Tuesday, February 28, 2012

What's being seeded in the greenhouse?

We've planted 6 varieties of kale for April sales at the market. (don't forget to make room for planting kale in April - it's VERY cold hardy). My new favorite is called Delaway. It isn't as beautiful as the others (looks big and cabbage-like), but is the very sweetest. It's the one I constantly nibble on as I work. Broccoli diCicco is up and growing fast, as well as Swiss chard (gold, red and silver), lettuces of all colors and a few other cold hardy plants.
Next week Caley and I will be starting pea plants that will be ready to plant out in April.
We also started lots of strawberries this year. Regular strawberries from our patch, and lots of the "wild" Alpine strawberries that are so delectable.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Greenhouse planting begins

Greenhouse in October 2011 snow

Photo: Onions in April 2011
We started planting onion seeds in the greenhouse at the beginning of February. We've sowed lots of my new favorite "Red Cippolini" These are the Italian flat-shaped onions that have fabulous taste and store for quite a while. For yellow storing onions we're growing Cortlands and for Australian Brown. Both of these seeds have been grown organically. We'll grow a few Walla Wallas but they came out pretty small last year. I hear these can be grown over winter for bigger onions so I may try that next year. We won't be growing any "Candy" sweet onions this year because Monsanto now owns all the seeds for these.  I won't support Monsanto and am upset that they have bought the rights to some of my favorite vegetable seeds. Check out the following link for more info http://inspirationgreen.com/organic-vegetables-start-out-as-seed.html  and another link to learn about Monsanto's history http://bestmeal.info/monsanto/company-history.shtml#timeline
It's almost time to start sowing seeds for chard, kale and lettuce- hard to believe!