gardening

[dragonlady7]

So. Everyone says, sow lettuce seed "as soon as the soil can be worked", or "start indoors 8 to 10 weeks earlier".
What if you started it indoors? When should you put it out?

I have three different varieties of lettuce that I started under my gro-light, and I don't know when to plant them outside.
(People's impression of our "frost-free date" also varies widely, but I imagine that's because people have different ideas of what that means-- "average date of last frost" is one thing, while "date beyond which there has never been a frost" is quite another, in fact over two weeks "quite another".)

Well, I was just outside, and the soil can sure as hell be worked now... I cleared out the part of last year's garden where the tomato, pepper, and cucumber plants were, pulled out all the weeds, turned over the soil, and put some fertilizer in it for good measure. And it's not only totally not frozen, it's also home to a fairly active earthworm rave, as far as I could tell. There were worms of every size and shape you could imagine, all having themselves remarkably fast-paced little parties. I mean, given that it's 34 and cloudy out, and they're cold-blooded (I assume?), they were wriggling around like it was a rainstorm in July.

But I don't know when I should set out the lettuce I planted, or when I should sow my beets and radishes...

Comments

[mother2012.livejournal.com]

Lettuce is a cool weather crop. They will even take a light snow, if it comes to that. I think you might go ahead and set out maybe half of what you have. I'm gambling, but I expect an early spring.

You might consider adding a few seeds while you're at it. They should grow without any problem now, and then you'll have a second crop comming a few weeks after the first one.

I've been itching myself, wanting to get my peas out, but I don't even know yet where I'm going to put them.

Getting an idea, though, while I'm sitting here thinking about it.

I think it's a bit early for the beets though. Don't know about the radishes.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Z and I are going to massively expand the garden, I think-- we realize we hardly use our lawn, but we used the garden extensively, so the lawn can be tiny in favor of a much larger garden.
So a lot of the space where the garden's going to be isn't ready yet. I'm thinking, though, of doing successive plantings-- meaning that the sooner I set out the lettuce in the choice, sunny bits of the garden, the sooner I'll be able to pull it up and put in tomatoes and peppers.

I did find a good definition of when soil can be "worked"-- it's not when it's unfrozen, as I'd thought, but it's when it's unfrozen thoroughly enough for the damp of the thaw to have drained, so that it's dry enough to work.
But it never froze in the first place. I turned the soil over to a depth of six or eight inches and it's all uniformly workable. It's as dry as can be expected, with clay...

I think I'm going to start using my sunporch to harden off the lettuce seedlings for transplant. It's supposed to be below freezing every night this week, but early next week is supposed to be sunny and warmer (44, 46), so maybe I'll aim for setting some of them out then?
I might plant a few seeds now though.

Radishes and beets are both also cool-weather plants, and in fact it's suggested that you intersperse beets with radishes because radishes grow faster and can mark the rows.

I think I'm going to put peas in around April 2nd. I tentatively marked most of my cold-weather crops for sowing then.

Spring here is just so much earlier than where I grew up, especially when the lake isn't frozen! We really will be having an early spring, without the reverse lake effect-- but I strongly doubt there's any ice on Erie at all. Which means much warmer weather much earlier.

We really got gypped on winter. Not that I'm going to complain that much about that.