Green Grows Again!

It's been beautiful here for a few days now and I decided it was time to allow the seedlings to stop bathing periodically in the sun and get moved outside for good. We're supposed to have a week or more of beautiful weather, so I'm hopeful they'll get acclimated enough and not be too shocked when cold weather comes again, which it undoubtedly will.

Here are the lettuce seedlings. They look really nice, but their roots were awful shallow and made them difficult to get out of the cell packs.

Below are the cauliflower and cabbage seedlings. This will be my third attempt at cauliflower. I'm so hopeful that they'll work. If not, I think I'll just concede defeat.

Stringing the grid with one piece of yarn is one of the best things I learned last year. Last year, the first time I strung the grid, I cut it into sections and stapled it down every foot. That didn't last and just made things difficult since I was so worried about dislodging the string.

This is so much better. I drive in a small nail every foot and anchor a piece of yarn to one corner nail. Then I wrap it around the nails to make the grid.
It's super easy and it stays all season. Now, the nails are a bit hairy at times. You can't prop your tuchus on the edge of the bed, but they work so well that I've just learned to be careful around them. Not the safest thing, I know, but terribly effective.

I took the cabbage and planted it in every space. I learned last fall that this was too close of a spacing, but this is supposed to be a tiny, dwarf cabbage, so I'm helpful it will work. I then checker boarded all of the broccoli and cauliflower.

I can't speak much for the cauliflower, but I've tried the broccoli checker boarded and then planted every square. The checkerboard was certainly the way to go. They all grew large and had beautiful heads. When I got greedy and planted them every space this fall, some didn't even grow heads since they were so shadowed by the others. I think SFG spacing is good for many things, but not broccoli for me.

I'm not happy with that compost I tilled in earlier this month. Now that it's dried out, it's just tough and chalky. Certainly not the quality I picked up from this place last year. I'm worried that it doesn't seem to hold moisture very much, but it may just possibly be that the top layer dries out quickly since when I was digging holes for the broccoli, it seemed to at least be somewhat damp down in there.

Now, if I can just keep the dog from eating the seedlings, I'll be doing pretty darn good.

Woohoo! It's gonna get green out there, my friends!