2022 Garden Plans

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  • #32674
    Mike Nolan
    Keymaster

      Time to start a new thread for our 2022 garden plans.

      I need to buy some fresh tomato seeds (I won't start any mortgage lifter or brandywine plants this year, though, they performed poorly last year) and decide if I want to start anything else indoors. My wife liked to grow eggplant, though she doesn't really like to eat it.

      I'm still toying around with setting up a hydroponics unit for growing butter crunch lettuce heads. I bought and read one of the standard texts on hydroponics, the 7th edition of Howard Resch's book, Hydroponic Food Production, but it is aimed more at commercial hydroponics than home/hobby sized units. It does have a lot of useful information, though. And I think I may finally have figured out what they mean by pruning the suckers from tomato plants.

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      #33006
      cwcdesign
      Participant

        Will has gotten industrious with salvaged wood from our attic. I got him the smaller HydroMars grow light for Christmas to see how it works. Attached, hopefully are a picture of our planter and the newly sprouted arugula on right and lettuce on left. We are trying to grow indoors rather than transplanting outside.

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        #33009
        cwcdesign
        Participant

          Here’s the photo of the sprouts

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          #33012
          Joan Simpson
          Participant

            Nice Cwcdesign.

            #33022
            chocomouse
            Participant

              Germination! Looks good. When can you start seeds outdoors, or transplant seedlings, in your area? I lived in Georgia for 2 years, but didn't garden back in the 60s. My indoor lettuce and spinach is almost ready to eat, but I'm holding off until it the leaves are bit bigger. But when I run out of store-bought next week, I'll probably start cutting it.

              #33023
              cwcdesign
              Participant

                Depending on the vege, some you can keep year round, but for summer veges transplanting around end of February-mid March. We gave up the community garden plot at the end of last summer. We don’t know if we’ll be able to grow veges here because of the amount of sun, or lack thereof - great sun in spring, not so much in the summer - we have tall oaks and pines around us, so we have to find patches of sun.

                #33053
                cwcdesign
                Participant

                  The lettuce, arugula, kale and box choi have all sprouted. We are still waiting for the carrots and the nasturtiums.

                  #33054
                  chocomouse
                  Participant

                    Carrots take forever to sprout! Sometimes up to 3 weeks, even with perfect conditions.

                    #33230
                    Mike Nolan
                    Keymaster

                      My seeds order is here, so I'm just waiting until the middle of March to start them growing inside.

                      The Aerogarden seems to be producing less pickable lettuce, and some of it is threatening to bolt, at which point it turns bitter. It is about 14 weeks old and that's probably a reasonable time frame for lettuce grown indoors under the thin-and-return method. The spinach didn't last very long, I think I got 2-3 decent pickings from it. The parsley is still sending up new stems, I've been picking it and taking it over to one of my wife's colleagues, I've got enough dried parsley from the first few pickings to last me a long time and they like to eat it fresh.

                      I may go ahead and rip one side out in the next week or so and get it ready to replant, then do the other one a few weeks later, so that I've got two sets of crops in slightly different parts of their cycle.

                      #33330
                      Mike Nolan
                      Keymaster

                        We actually had rain last night and it is likely to rain on and off all day today. Might get cold enough for some snow.

                        #33344
                        Mike Nolan
                        Keymaster

                          Well, a few days ago it was close to 80 here, and overnight we got 2 inches of snow and lows in the teens.

                          My father-in-law was trained as a meteorologist by the Army during WWII and used to say if you didn't like the weather in Nebraska, wait an hour.

                          #33371
                          BakerAunt
                          Participant

                            We awoke today to five inches of snow.

                            #33372
                            chocomouse
                            Participant

                              We're getting a big storm Sat. all day into Sunday, 6 -12 inches, possibly preceded by sleet and freezing rain. Maybe I'll start some more plants inside.

                              #33375
                              Mike Nolan
                              Keymaster

                                Last year I got my tomato plants started inside on April 2nd, this year I'm hoping to have them started a week or so earlier. I'm still trying to figure out where I'm going to set them up, the last two years I did it in the guest bathroom on first floor, this year I'm probably doing it in the basement.

                                I'm hoping to start tomatoes, eggplants and maybe some melons. (I want to try having at least two groups of melons started a few weeks apart so that they don't all ripen in the same two to three week period in August.)

                                I've been looking at drip irrigation systems, I'm still waffling between using them (with 1-2 hours setup and work at the end of the season to winterize them) or just using soaker hoses. Last year I didn't do either and I think some of my tomato plants suffered during the hot dry portion of the summer (which we almost always get.)

                                #33601
                                Mike Nolan
                                Keymaster

                                  I got 7 types of tomatoes, 2 types of eggplants and 2 types of melons started indoors earlier this week, I'm going to start a few more of those melons in 2-3 weeks and then probably plant one hill directly outdoors in May, in the hopes of getting melons that don't all ripen at once over about two weeks in August. I'm already seeing some signs of the tomatoes sprouting; I'll probably have cotyledons by next weekend.

                                  I've still got 5 bays open on the seed starter trays, not sure if I'll do anything with them. If I had some fresh seeds I might do some basil, thyme or oregano, but my wife usually buys those from the UNL student plant sale around the end of the semester, along with all the flowers for her patio pots.

                                  I ripped out the left half of the Aerogarden earlier this week, what hadn't bolted fully wasn't producing many edible leaves, and today I started a new lettuce garden, 3 varieties of leaf lettuce plus some more parsley. (Not that we use much parsley, but it is a good spacer and I don't know that we need 24 pods of lettuces, as my wife prefers iceberg lettuce these days and it is too big for an Aerogarden. I might set up a gravel drain system using some plastic tubing, but I think I'll wait until late summer for that. A friend of ours will take all the parsley I can grow, they eat it daily.)

                                  The right garden can probably be picked for another couple of weeks, then I'll rip it out and start something over there, probably more lettuces and maybe some small herbs. (No dill!)

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