Seeds sprouting, sun setting

It is a lovely evening in Cambridge…

Evening along the Charles River - Weeks footbridge at right

…and in the garden.

Note the handstand-er in the background

A salad table looking dignified

The seeds we direct sowed into the salad tables – arugula, lettuce, mizuna, chard, radishes – have begun to sprout.

Yes, I know arugula is spelled wrong on the tag

Mizuna is a feathery-leaved mustard green with a fairly mild taste. A great "cut and come again" green

Earlier this week, we built a hoophouse over one of the beds to use for hardening seedlings. Seedlings raised in the greenhouse are used to cushy indoor conditions – constant light and temperature, no wind, etc. They need to be exposed little by little to the extremes of the outdoors before being transplanted. So, we keep them in the hoophouse and leave it open a little longer every day, building up to the fateful day when they’ll get planted in the beds.

The hoophouse, open

The seedlings seem to be doing just fine in there.

'Red Grand Rapids' lettuce

'Red Rosie' lettuce, 'Red Russian' kale, radicchio, etc. I sense a theme developing here.

When the hoophouse is closed, it’s not quite as elegant looking, but (to my taste) no less noble.

The edge of the plastic is held down with speed bump panels. We are resourceful

Transplanting fun; notes on cilantro

While the weather outside fluctuates in typical early-spring fashion, our work in the greenhouse continues. Last week we began moving seedlings from their communal pots to smaller peat pots – one seedling per peat pot.

Our greenhouse admin and general savior, Janet, found a big bag of derelict peat pots for us to use. There is some debate over whether peat pots, and the use of peat-based products in general, are a good idea. Some gardeners report that the peat pots are slow to break down once you plunk them into the dirt. Peat moss itself, meanwhile, is harvested from sphagnum bogs, where it has accumulated very very slowly over eons of quiet boggy growth. In other words, it takes a lot less time to harvest it than it does for it to form, leading many to call the peat moss industry unsustainable; and although producers do reseed and restore the bogs after harvest, the restored bogs may lack the biodiversity of the original ones.

On the other hand, these peat pots had just been sitting around for a few years, so we figured we might as well use them. Putting the pots directly in the dirt will also help us avoid transplant shock. Nonetheless, when the time comes when we actually have to get new transplanting supplies, maybe we’ll use normal flats or soil blocks instead.

Back to the greenhouse. The seedlings were all chugging along nicely…

'Bright Lights' chard seedlings looking fluorescent

'Red Rosie' lettuce seedlings already showing their namesake color

The tomato seedlings (transplanted into their peat pots) look pretty huge from this angle. Varieties shown here: Sungold, Brandywine, Green Zebra, Viva Italia. On the way: Celebrity, Peacevine Cherry, Stupice, Ropreco Paste, Yellow Perfection. We are aiming for tomato diversity

This batch of seedlings is pretty heavy on the cold weather starts, like lettuces and brassicas, as well as the sorts of heat loving crops that transplant well – peppers, tomatoes, eggplants. It’s still a bit early to start the squashes and cucumbers.

The completed flats of peat pots

I am enthused

Of course, we will also be direct seeding a bunch of crops into the outdoor beds once they exist. These crops will include cilantro, which brings me to the second matter of this blog post. I am one of those people who thinks cilantro is incredibly disgusting. In fact, I am a longtime member of the currently (but hopefully temporarily) defunct site ihatecilantro.com, through which cilantro-haters like myself could share stories of our harrowing first encounters with the herb, trade cilantro-denouncing haiku, and tearfully affirm that we were not alone.

Anyway, Harold McGee, food science dude extraordinaire, has an article in this week’s New York Times food section about people like me. Apparently, science hasn’t quite figured us out yet. There are many possible causes for our plight, from genetic predisposition to a lack of positive experiences associated with the demon weed. McGee even interviews a scientist who conditioned himself to like cilantro by repeatedly eating it in pleasurable contexts. As someone who has unsuccessfully attempted a fair amount of this conditioning myself, I tend to favor the genetic explanation, but for now I’m content to be a mystery of science.

In any case, if you want to begin to understand why I don’t order pico de gallo at Felipe’s, go ahead and read the article. Otherwise, stay tuned for more updates as the weather gets warmer, raised beds get installed, and hot pepper seedlings (hopefully) sprout.