This is one of those old-guy, life-is-like-a-roll-of-toilet-paper posts. About gardening, yet.
If you actually have things to do, just move along, there’s nothing here for you.
Today’s topics are ginger, spinach, tomatoes, and garlic.
1: Ginger. If you enjoy watching paint dry …
… you’ll love sprouting ginger.
I decided on a whim to try growing ginger this year. Apparently, it can be done in Zone 7, you just have to start them in the winter and grow them as housplants until mid-summer.
On the plus side, yes, you can sprout grocery-store ginger root. There’s mine, above.
On the down side, I planted this particular piece of root just shy of one month ago.
On the other plus side, the internet correctly warned me that this was a slow and piecemeal process.
This is interestingly unlike anything else I’ve ever grown. Usually, you plant a bunch of fill-in-the-blank, and then, however long it takes them to sprout, you get a bunch of sprouted fill-in-the-blank. All at the same time. Not so with ginger. Each piece of root proceeds according to its own timetable.
On the other down side, this means I have to run an electrical heat mat for months. I’m only running this at six watts, by using a lamp dimmer in the circuit. But it runs all the time, so that by the time these are done sprouting (say, three months total?), that’ll be about 13 KWH, or enough electricity to drive may be 65 miles. That’s rounding error, in the grand scheme of things, I guess. But I’d rather avoid it if I could.
In hindsight, I ought to have started these around New Year’s Day. Or not at all. But now that something has sprouted, I’m going to keep going.
2: Spinach. What, I’m already late?
Source: Clipart library.com
Yes, I yam.
My wife is particularly fond of fresh spinach. But I’ve never had the least luck growing it.
Maybe that’s because I didn’t know what I was doing. So this year, I actually read the directions.
Turns out, spinach seeds like being in the cold, wet ground. Far more than I would have guessed. You should sow spinach seeds four to eight weeks before your expected last frost of the spring.
Or, in my case, the eight week limit was a couple of weeks ago. So today I planted a few short rows of spinach. I’m sure this is vastly earlier than I have ever planted spinach in the past. Maybe I’ll actually get a decent yield this year.
3: Tomatoes. No way that it’s time to start tomatoes now. Is it?
Yep, sure is. In Zone 7, it’s time to start short-season (a.k.a. cold-tolerant) tomatoes, indoors, if you grow them. Varieties like 4th of July or Early Girl, and more exotic ones that promise to produce tomatoes in a hurry.
After trying out various approaches to growing tomatoes, I’ve now settled down to growing some short-season (cold-tolerant) ones, and some regular-season ones. (I’ve given up on heat-tolerant or late-season tomatoes, because all of those that I have grown have tasted just like bland grocery-store tomatoes.)
Cold-tolerant or short-season tomatoes can go out in the garden as soon as all danger of frost is past. They can tolerate the cool nights that we’re still having in early spring. By contrast, regular-season tomatoes have to wait another month or so, beyond that, until the nights have warmed up.
Anyway, in my area, we’re now about six weeks before our nominal last frost date of April 22. So it’s time to get my early-season tomato plants started, indoors. A week or so to germinate, five weeks or so to grow, then out into the garden they will go.
I was more than happy with the short-season (cold-tolerant) tomatoes I planted the past couple of years, so this is just a re-run. I just set up six starts each of:
- Burpee’s 4th of July.
- Glacier
- Moskovitch.
- Quedlinburger Furhe Libe
Transplanted into the garden on or about my last frost date (April 22), I find that the 4th of July is true to its name, and has consistently given me its first tomato on that date, plus or minus a week. Glacier and Moskovitch come in a few days later. But for a truly early tomato, Quedlinburger Furhe Libe takes the prize in my garden, consistently beating 4th of July by a week or so.
These all yield decent-tasting golf-ball-sized tomatoes. They keep on yielding through the summer. And the deer leave them alone, at least once the plants have a bit of size on them. What’s not to like?
It’s hard to think about the 4th of July right now, when we’re still having freezing nights. But there’s a solid and logical chain between starting those seeds today and eating tomatoes out of the garden in early summer.
Sometimes I wish the rest of my life had been that linear.
4: Garlic: The hazards of planning for failure.
And then there’s the garlic I planted last fall.
I’ve tried growing garlic in prior years. I’ve never gotten much yield. But then again, I never did it right.
Among the things I didn’t know were that you really shouldn’t use grocery-store garlic for planting. That’s for two reasons. First, it’s all “soft-neck” garlic, which is both bland and does not grow well in the hot and humid Virginia climate. (Though it does keep well, which is why you find it in the industrial food chain.) Instead, I want to grow hard-neck garlic, which I can’t get in the stores here, and has to be bought from a supplier of some sort. Second, “culinary grade” garlic is the puny stuff. They reserve the biggest heads, with the biggest cloves, to be “seed grade” garlic. And it is well-documented that if you plant bigger cloves, you’ll harvest bigger heads of garlic. Which is precisely why they save the big stuff for use as seed.
The final thing I didn’t know is that garlic may benefit from the addition of a modest amount of sulfur to your soil. That’s covered in Post G23-067.
Last fall, I decided to do it correctly. Just for a change.
I bought three varieties of seed-grade hard-neck garlic from Snickers Run Farm, a Northern Virginia garlic farm. Their product was, by a longshot, the burliest heads of true garlic I’ve ever seen. (N.B, elephant garlic is not actually garlic.) I added a modest amount of a sulfur-containing fertilizer (Espoma Holly Tone) to the soil, along with compost and mulch. And I planted in the late fall, when it was already pretty cold, though in hindsight, I probably should have planted later.
By-the-book, start to finish.
Based on prior experience, I didn’t expect much. I figured half of them would survive. So … rational or not, I planted quite a lot of it. (Plus, I had to buy quite a bit of seed garlic to justify the shipping cost, which didn’t exactly help temper my decision-making.)
I looked that bed over today, and my only thought was, what on earth was I thinking. Because, as of today, I have a 32-square-foot bed chock-a-block with garlic plants that seem very happy to be here.
Based on various estimates of typical yield, this should give me somewhere around 8 pounds of garlic, if it all comes to fruition. That, where the recommended planting is about one pound, per adult, per year.
Luckily, garlic goes great with tomatoes. And, I suspect, will go with pretty much everything I’m going to cook from June onwards, this year.
