Wow, we picked our first spring turnips today! Little young ones with a turnip about 1/2″ in diameter.  In another 1-2 weeks they will mature out to full size spring turnips of about 1 to 2″ in diameter.

These are fast varieties – almost like growing radishes.  We use either Hakauri or Market Express varieties which have a growing season of about 40-45 days.  They were planted in mid-March in our unheated greenhouse.

We like them really young, and tend to harvest them early.  We very lightly steam the whole plant (tops and all) and add a bit of soy sauce for seasoning.  Yum!

In the Transition Garden, we planted spinach in late September in our unheated 20′ x 24′ greenhouse.  We were picking this spinach in late November and early December, and let it rest in January and February in a dormant state.  Despite unknown varmints (perhaps voles) that got in there over the winter and dug up many of the plants, many others survived.  We began picking again in mid-March onward as the plants began to come out of dormancy and grow again.  In early May, now they are growing like crazy and we are picking a lot.

However, spinach knows when its time to think about seed production, and we are now seeing the first plants beginning to put up their seed stalks.  The plants are aware of the increased day length and warmth.  In the trade, this natural phase of ‘going to seed’ is known as ‘bolting.’  Its also sign that our continuous harvest time of leaves is drawing nigh.   We can see the seed stem beginning to elongate in some of the plants. The leaves have also gotten smaller and are more arrowhead shaped.

In another week or two, it will be time to do one last thorough harvest and pull out the plants to make way for summer crops like tomatoes, peppers and basil. We will leave a handful of these spinach plants to continue their process, go on to flowering and produce seed. We will then harvest the stalks and save the seed late in the season.

Check out the Facebook Group discussing food security in St Margarets Bay:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/foodinthebay/

It’s only a few weeks old and there are well over 100 active members.  Let’s keep the conversations going about food.

Its becoming increasingly obvious that our highly aggregated and centralized food supply chains are vulnerable to continued disruption.  For example, a recent Bloomberg report pointed out the problem that has been developing for decades:

“…The problem is consolidation, and with Tyson, JBS SA and Cargill Inc, three mega-corporations that control 66% of America’s beef, as much of it is processed in just a few dozen meatpacking facilities across the US. Only a few companies also dominate pork and chicken.

There have been at least 12 closures of meatpacking plants in April because of virus-related issues among employees. This has resulted in at least 25% of pork and 10% of beef processing capacity coming offline in the last several weeks,…”

Grow you own, and know who grows the rest for you.  It’s the most resilient system that has been proven by history.

Think about getting a greenhouse of some kind, if you don’t already have one.  Building infrastructure like that is an important part of scaling your food production.  While there is an upfront cost, it will pay off extremely well in the years ahead.  Just think about the cost of vegetables for the grocery store or farmers market.  You can spend quite a bit very quickly, and these costs will only increase.

With a greenhouse, you can get both a significant jump on the growing season by producing transplants early on, and you can use the greenhouse during the warm summer months for production of the heat-loving plants like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and basil.

This is our early transplant greenhouse (approx 8’x16′), with double wall polycarbonate glazing.  By mid-April, it is already full of seed trays and pots of all kinds of things.  In another two weeks, some of these transplants will begin to go out into the garden – cold hardy leaf lettuces, bok choy, cabbage, broccoli and onions.  We will continue to grow out the tomatoes and peppers, which we started in mid-March.

Some years we have produced as many as 7,000 transplants out of the smallish greenhouse!

If you don’t have one yet, visit others, talk with the owners, look at vary types and decide for yourself how you might proceed based on your budget and space.

Happy greenhousing!

Mid-April is a good time for planting potatoes.  Even though we may be still 3-4 weeks away from the last frost, the planted potatoes will slowly emerge from the soil during this time in a frost hardy manner, giving them a good start to the season.

Potatoes used for seed need to have an ‘eye’ or a bud.  This ‘eye’ will grow into the new plant.  You can cut up potatoes and plant the pieces, but make sure each piece has at least one ‘eye’. Our seed potatoes, red chieftains and Yukon gold, sat out at room temperature for the past month so that these ‘eyes’ could start growing ahead of time.  We will also be planting a few varieties of the fingerling potatoes.

We like to plant our potatoes in the bottom of a long ditch filled with compost, with each piece about 12″ apart.  They need lots of room.  As the potatoes grow, we will begin to fill in the ditch in mid-June, and then even pile more compost around the stems in mid-July.  This helps the plants produce even more potatoes.

You can harvest the first ‘new potatoes’ some time in July.  A good indicator when the first new potatoes are ready is when the first flowers begin to show up on the plant tops.  Dig in carefully from the side and remove some new potatoes without damaging the rest of the plant, and it will keep producing more potatoes for fall harvest.  With your new potatoes, get out the frying pan, some butter, a little thyme and parsley, get cooking and enjoy!!

Here is a PDF below with recent opinion article pointing out the need for advance planning in our food system, and why you should plan to capitalize fully on the coming growing season with your gardening plans.

Commentary – Food security for a world in crisis

Garlic is a wonderful crop.  In addition to it being an essential cooking ingredient, it also have amazing anti-viral and other health properties.  It has very few pests.  I’ve heard a few reports of deer munching on garlic, but very rare (and they must be an Italian variety of deer!).  And, it is a prized and valuable farmers market item, holiday gift item or great for bartering for other things you need.  So, grow plenty.  There are usually 400 or so cloves planted here every year.  Keep in mind that you need about 25% of the harvest for next years planting.

Plant your garlic in last October or early November, like you would a fall flower bulb.  Garlic will then ‘get its feet in the ground’ before freeze up and be staged and ready for spring.  It is one of the first out of the ground, as soon as the ground thaws and warms a bit.

These photos were taken on April 14th, and the garlic is coming up nicely through the straw mulch.  By mid-May it will be at least knee high, and by mid-June up to your chest.  It is a heavy feeder, so give it lots of compost.  It also like a lot of sulfur in the soil to make it as garlicky and spicy as possible.

I’m slowly getting better at growing the super hot chilies – bhut jolokia, seven-pot, ghost and chichen itza – with Scoville ratings over 1 million.

These babies were started in mid February. Germination needed 85-90F, so seed trays were started on a heating pad with towels around it for insulation and a clear dome lid.  They were transplanted into these pots in mid-March. They are under a high-intensity LED grow light with 16 hour days, and still on the heating pad.  Intense chili aroma comes off just by brushing the leaves!  They will be re-transplanted into larger pots and go into one of the greenhouses in late April or early May.

In addition to sprouts, microgreens are one of the quickest ways to generate salad and sandwich fixin’s.  I use a cafeteria tray filled about 1/4″ with potting mix and lots of previously soaked microgreen seeds.  I buy these in bulk from Mumm’s Sprouting Seeds.  It takes about 2 weeks of less start to finish.

These greens below are a combination of fenugreek, sunflowers, peas and fava beans. Get out the salad dressing!!

Bob wrote a post earlier this week about LED grow lights and duration.

If you can’t afford LED grow lights, or you have some old shop light fixtures, you can make do with those inexpensive hanging shop fluorescent fixtures that use 2 tubes each. I converted the front hall closet into a grow op with two 4 ft units hung cup hooks screwed into the bottom of pine shelves. The only thing I would change is I would buy the fixture with the flared reflector so the seedlings at the edges of the trays were more evenly lit across the width of the tray (they tend to lean in a bit). I lined my closet with aluminum foil and drape some foil over the front of the trays to compensate.

If you buy a fluorescent tube set up, you need to know a little about colour temperature. Not much, though. ‘Kelvin’ is the scale used for colour temperature. If you’ve ever dabbled in photography, you’ll have a sense of what this means, because colour temperature has traditionally been used to describe the light sources, and setting ‘white balances’ and such. I read somewhere that was probably because the folks who invented photography were also physicists. It’s not really about light sources or levels, but you can go nerd out on this 3 minute video if you need to know more (yes, I watched it, of course I did).

Color temperatures over 5000 K are called “cool colors” (bluish), while lower color temperatures (2700–3000 K) are called “warm colors” (yellowish).

Anywho, when you purchase the fluorescent tubes, you want to make sure that the colour matches what you want to grow. Lightbulbs that are between 3,000 to 4,500K are better for growing leaves, while lower colour temperatures, around 2,700 K are good for flowering and fruiting stages.

I have 3,000K bulbs in my set up.