Seed Scattering

The new cold frame is on the raised bed, while the old one waits to be hauled away. The snow is still pretty even with the top of the raised beds!

Yesterday afternoon I walked out through a foot of crunchy snow and put my hand into the cold frame to see if the soil was perhaps thawed enough to work. It was only about 18 degrees outside, but the sun was shining and icicles were dripping from the eaves of the house.

Inside the cold frame, it was warm! The soil was fluffy several inches down, dry on top and moist beneath. Never has soil so clearly asked me for seed.

The biggest issues in the garden at this stage is how many seeds to plant and when to start them. You can sow thick and then thin out the plants,  or you can try to space the seed (there are even tapes with the seed already spaced for you that you can roll out in straight rows, which kind of cracks me up).

Over the issue of when to plant, my friend Connie said something very liberating to me a few years ago– “What if it doesn’t come up? Or comes up too fast? You just plant some more! (and it’s nice to have something green in the windowsill in February and March).” Plant early and plant often, I say!

Last week, my sister-in-law Annie sent me an article from Slate about a woman who uses greens more or less as mulch in her garden. She plants whatever crop goes in the bed (cucumbers, tomatoes, etc), then throws handfuls of seeds for greens and carrots around the plants. She harvests baby salads as the more substantial plants grow up.

There are some plants I definitely like to space: beets are chief among them. No need to scatter beet seed, because they germinate so well. You still need to thin them because the seeds are actually clusters (one reason they germinate so well– at least one seed in the cluster is going to take root).  They need space to grow large.

A friend tells a funny story of her husband laying out a serious grid (think graph paper) and instructing her to put one carrot seed in each tiny square. After struggling to separate the tiny seeds and get them in the squares, she threw down the whole packet and walked away. Carrots are definitely meant to be scattered and thinned. In fact, they need to be thinned again and again. I don’t like the idea of including them in the “edible mulch” because if they’re too close together they won’t get large enough. Though it is true that they grow very slowly and it might work out just right, using up the lettuce as they’re getting going.

I have 24 beautiful little green plants right now in the basement: arugula, tennis ball lettuce, bordeaux spinach (though only one of these came up), winterbor kale and quarantina raab (it’s an experiment). I didn’t rush them out to the cold frame yesterday, because it’s still dropping down to near zero temperatures at night.

But I did trudge back out to the cold frame with my seed packets of winter lettuce, giant winter spinach, mizuna and arugula, and I cleared out a good-sized rectangle and scattered the tiny seeds thickly.  I want a salad by mid-April if possible!

(Meanwhile, a large turkey, somehow separated from his group [and elusive enough to avoid my camera], has been hanging around, eating out of the compost bins and, whenever the snow melts enough to reveal the garlic beds, pulling all the straw out!! I just keep going out and heaping it back over the garlic plants. It’s still frozen so I don’t think he’s gotten any bulbs.)