No snow this winter, but darn cold

written by Yvonne

Germination of seeds planted two weeks ago has occurred. Namely butter crunch lettuce, radishes, and onions.  Here you can mostly see the lettuce.

This week I planted batch #2 of the butter crunch lettuce, radishes and onions in pots.  Also started were beets, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, mesculm lettuce, red sails lettuce, and all of our herbs including basil, cilantro, rosemary, marjoram, chamomile, chives, bergamont, and oregano (I think that was everything.)

A friend of ours gave us this handy seed sorter. It worked for some seeds, but not all.

Everything was put into the mini-greenhouse with the hope that it's warm enough in there to encourage growth.

Olive and I also planted batch #2 of the carrots and peas (hee hee).

Two of the snow peas from batch #1 have already come up.  They just can't wait to push through and start producing!

Tom finally got to feeding his worms.  He said they're doing great and producing lots of castings. Now that we're starting the majority of our seeds in pots, we'll be using more worm casting than ever.  Once it gets a little warmer outside, and once he's taken care of whatever is pressing with the bees, he'll do another harvest of castings which I'll mix into the potting soil used to plant our seeds.

This sure does look like a lot of green stuff growing, doesn't it?  Well it is, but only some of it is what I want.  The dark green, fuzzy stuff on the left is dill and the two patch to the front-center and right are thyme. Everything else is weeds which I pulled out.  (Guess I should have taken an after picture to show the difference.)

Cabbage plants EVERYWHERE but only a few developing heads. A certain someone advised another certain someone that it was too many to be planted in one area.  I, er, uh, that someone was right.  So that same someone went though and pulled out any plants that were small, crowding another plant, or didn't have a head.  This is the before...

And this is the after.  Some actually did have heads forming which is great because I didn't think any were.  Now THIS looks like the right amount, wouldn't you say?

Here the collards, dog head, and Swiss chard are all doing well.

This item perplexed us. It's at the end of the of the Swiss chard row.  Both of us agreed it looks more like arugula than chard... and yet there are leaves that look like chard too.

Upon further investigation, it was both. There was an arugula plant (right) growing super close to the chard (left) and they had become intertwined.

I preformed a little open chard surgery (Tom came up with that one) and did my best to gently separate the chard from the arugula.

The surgery seems to be a success but we'll need to keep a close eye on it to see if the chard makes a full recovery.

With the large arugula successfully removed...

it was time to commence eating!