A TIME TO PLANT

Remember that song from the 60's, Turn, Turn, Turn?  A community choir here is learning a very nice arrangement of that for a concert.  One of the lines (from Ecclesiastes) goes: A time to plant, a time to reap....

Yesterday was my time to plant.  We've done a lot of transplanting this spring, taking finger-nail sized plants from trays of 500 and placing them in the 4- and 6-packs in which they are sold.  That's pretty boring work!  And very dirty!  I wrote about that recently.

Well, yesterday I did some seeding.  Here are the pots I seeded:

From the left: a lone Buttercrunch Lettuce in an oval pot.  These are THE BEST lettuces to buy in the supermarket.  They come in individual plastic containers and still have the root attached.  They stay alive in the fridge for ages, opposite from other lettuces that very soon turn slimy.  This time of the year I save the last few leaves and the root and plant the lettuce in a pot.  It will spread its roots and keep on producing.  I can pick the outside leaves, enough for a salad, once a week, and the plant will continue to produce more leaves.  Later I'll add another plant to this pot and have a continuous supply of absolutely fresh lettuce.

There are several rather large (4" pots), each containing one corn kernel.  By the end of May, each of these 40 pots will have a nice, sturdy corn plant, ready to go into the garden bed and produce ripe corn (if the weather cooperates) by the end of July.  There is NOTHING as nice as an ear of corn, picked 5 minutes ago, boiled for 1 minute and dressed with butter, salt and pepper!  Food to be savoured!

You can barely see a rim of a blue ceramic pot behind the corn.  There are a few basil seeds in that.  Hopefully the will sprout and there will be a pot of fresh basil on the patio this summer.

The oblong pot to the right rear has a dark leaf variety of lettuce.  Another pot for the patio growing fresh salad greens.

The oval pot has been seeded with spinach.  This is just for now and will also be on the patio.  Quite soon lettuce and spinach can be seeded in the garden beds.  But this gives a jump start to harvesting fresh greens.

In front of the oval pot is a rectangle of Walla Walla Onions.  I sewed whatever seed was still in the packet from last year and hope to have some fresh, sweet onions in the garden beds.  I'll have to hide them in the middle of the corn or potatoes because the deer ate even the onions in the garden last summer!  Because of the deer depredations last year I plan to grow only corn, squash and potatoes in the beds this summer.  I'm just not interested in providing tender bean and pea plants for the "Deer Buffet" this year!

And last, but not least are several small pots that have three "Sweet Million" tomatoes seeded.  These will be transplanted to larger pots when they have grown sufficiently.  Some of these will be on the patio, and some will join the large tomato pots that we plan to keep in the #2 greenhouse over summer this year.  Have you ever tried the Sweet Million salad tomatoes?  Actually, most of them are eaten right off the vine, whenever one of us happens to pass by and see a few red, ripe gems.

This was dirty work to get it all seeded, but worthwhile.  I hope to have some wonderful fresh eating from this salad "buffet."