Mr. Green Jons

It’s been a busy few weeks for me (I’m in school right now) and I’ve had little time to post, so I’m sorry for that.

That being said, I’ve had a flurry of activity in the garden in the last 12 days or so.  Here is a comprehensive list of all that is edible in my garden that I have planted recently or is already growing:

• Kohlrabi
• Swiss Chard
• Fava (broad) Beans
• Green Onions
• Spring Onions
• Kale (purple and green)
• Carrots
• Peas
• Lettuce (red and green leaf and points in between)
• Spinach (in the ground and in a large container)
• Chamomile (in a pot and in the old herb garden)
• Early zucchini

I’m very excited that my garden is actually starting to look like a garden and not just a bunch of rows and mounds made out of dirt.  The rows of lettuce have sprouted and are doing nicely.  I think I mentioned in an earlier post that the slugs got to the old starts that I’d planted.

The sprouts are doing well and I’ve thinned them out.  Lettuce is sensitive to overcrowding, so thinning is necessary when seeds are planted in a bulk fashion.  I’ve also thinned my spinach, kohlrabi, and kale.  This will become even more important as the little shoots turn into little plants. Plants’ roots grown in the spaces in the soil; they don’t make their own paths, so if one plants takes another’s route, one of them will do better than the other.  They also use the same nutrients, so thinning just helps your sprouts to thrive and turn into plants.

Here’s a visual constructed of grammatical symbols that will illustrate how I work at thinning in my garden as plants grow:

I plant seeds heavily because I don’t want to risk getting nothing and also because seed is usually pretty cheap. So the first sign of sprouts might look like a row with no breaks:

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When they are at the above stage (which is that they have just popped out of the ground and have been up for a few days), I would gently remove every other plant in that string so that it looks like this.  Be careful not to be too rough, as you don’t want to remove the plants that you’re going to want to grow to full size.

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

I’d then let them grow at that level for a week or two until they were noticeably different from their sprouts. They’ll be slightly bigger and would appear to be encroaching on their neighbor’s real estate.  I’d then thin every other plant again.

% % % % % % % % % % % % % % % %

Keep this process up for a couple of times and stop when the plants appear to be doing well and are healthy.  You don’t want to pull up strong sprouts and you don’t want to pull so many that you won’t have any produce.  Also, I only recommend this for “small seeded” items like lettuce, carrots, and spinach, where it’s difficult to plant just one seed at a a time.  Try to plant larger seeded items like kale, broccoli, cauliflower, etc one at a time in a pre-spaced fashion, as you don’t want to disturb them by tugging up a neighbor’s roots.

With products like spinach and lettuce, don’t just throw the sprouts away.  They can be added to other salads as a mix in, or when they’re big enough, they can make a salad all on their own.