First transplants

Today was moving day for these happy little greens!

Spicy mesclun, scallions, butterhead lettuce

Cilantro

Butterhead Lettuce

They have been growing inside under fluorescent lights for three weeks and are ready to venture out to the backyard now. We've set them out in our new hoop house during the day for the last few days to get acclimated to the outdoors a bit. 

In addition to building the portable hoop house above, Dan secured some hoops to one of our raised beds this weekend so that we can cover the tender plant starts and provide a more protected environment during these early spring days.

This is our first year experimenting with season extending in this way. Without the plastic cover, we would need to wait a bit longer to plant outside.

I'm so happy with our new soil block system for seed starting. I've never had such healthy, vibrant seedlings. I think the homemade potting mix helped, too. We used a combination of peat, local organic compost, perlite (which I just learned is a naturally occurring volcanic rock), and an all-purpose organic fertilizer.

To prepare our bed for planting, we let the chickens scratch around for slugs and eat up the nice lush crimson clover cover crop. Then we cut back the remaining clover, put it in the compost, and lightly hand-tilled with a garden fork to loosen the clover roots and aerate the soil.

One of our beds with crimson clover still growing as a cover crop (and garlic sprouting with a straw mulch in the back)

We would have added compost at this time, but didn't have any quite ready. Hopefully we can side dress the plants with compost once we have some ready. We worked in some lime and the all-purpose organic fertilizer (purchased at Concentrates) recommended by Steve Solomon in Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, then popped the little soil block transplants into the bed. No plastic pots to wrestle with!

 

One of the benefits of minimal tilling is that our friends the earthworms (and all the other soil critters) are left in one piece. Now, with any luck, we'll be eating fresh backyard greens in just a few weeks!