Scorching the Garden 2022
March PT 2
Welcome to our 5th documented grow! This will be our biggest yet. Just like last time, and the time before. But if you have been following us or if you look into our past, you’ll see we grow every year. We’ll be updating the grow every 2 weeks until November when it gets shut down. Like every season premier, we start out with seeds and some supplies.
Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy.
We placed three flats of quick germinating sproutlets under the lights a over a week ago and let the rest of the seeds to do their thing. With a steady temperature of around 70F with a relative humidity of 85%, this is the perfect environment for the young plants to thrive.
This was our least stressful start of a grow we have ever had. A contributing factor may be that we are so busy, we don’t have time to worry about the seeds popping.
When we revisited the nursery, nearly everything has sprouted. The perlite and soufflé cup germination worked really well. We can confidently pull the spouts out with a pair of curved tweezers without worrying about damaging the delicate taproot. An overwhelming majority of transplants took right away. A few were tanged together and both sprouted up. With early intervention, twins can be separated and both can live full, normal lives, providing a plethora of pungent pucker punished pepper pots.
So many seeds germinated and so many transplants survived, we have a huge amount of sproutlets that are going to need a home. And we do have a home already set up in our parking lot. We can fit an additional 70 or so plants here, which will make weeding, watering and harvesting much easier.
We hit up the plot to do some recon. Sure, we won’t be planting for another two months, but we like to plan ahead.
We came on the right day it would seem. A fresh load of mature compost was dropped off. When it’s freshly dumped, it’s nice an loose. It smells great and is nice and dark. We collected around 30 buckets during this visit. All in all, we’re going to need about 10x that amount, but this is a good start for now.
We’ve been doing this for a while and we’ve seen all sorts of ridiculous ways people load up compost. The worst we’ve seen is scooping it off of the ground with a push snow shovel into a plastic shopping bag. It’s truly mind-blowing the ways people come up with that are just totally wrong.
The correct way to harvest compost is simply to lean the bucket next to the heap, and scrape the compost above so it falls in. Fill, replace, repeat. Let gravity do the work. If the pile is flat, then lay the bucket down and scrape it in or make it into a pile again. Work smart and hard.
We turn from the hill of soil to examine the first of our two plots. At first glance, it looks like a dead field. We had a mild winder so there is a good chance any weed seeds survived. Now that the weather is shifting, we’ll see just how well the cardboard is still working. Some grasses have sprouted up. There is a lot of mint and morning glory lurking beneath the surface. That’s something we’ve been fighting for a while. If we owned the land, we’d just burn the field every few years.
We’ll be doing more prep work on the garden before we put the plants in. With how busy our schedule will be this season, the more we do now means the less we’ll have to do later. Check out where you can find us this spring through summer and come out to say hi and grab a bottle of sauce (while supplies last) and/or a bite to eat.
Do you enjoy the burn?
[ C L I C K H E R E ]
