Planting frenzy with the warm early spring

There is nothing better for a freshly transplanted veggie than for weather that doesn’t cause them much stress.

Already having to deal with transplant shock, they don’t want to also have to deal with hot weather and windy days so the last few days have been ideal for all the veggies we are planting.

This week is a big planting week for us with tray after tray of lettuce, bok choy, cabbage, broccoli and parsley being transplanted.

Some of the transplants were hoping to be planted last week but a issue with the well delayed that and gratefully that problem was fixed quickly.

Now that these plants are in the field their roots are jumping for joy with the extra space to explore for more nutrients than they had in the cell trays.

With all these transplants the fields are starting to fill up with the spring veggies and we will start planting summer crops soon.

In addition to the transplanting we have also been doing a lot of direct seeding of carrots, spinach, beets, radishes, arugula and turnips.

For most of those crops we sow them every couple of weeks so that we always have them ready to be harvested throughout the spring.

We do larger less frequent plantings for carrots and spinach which the first plantings of are starting to grow now after taking a little bit of time to germinate.

Just as those seeds are germinating so are the weeds and since we need to be watering the veggies to grow as it gets warmer that also allows the weeds to grow.

The next two months there will be a lot of weeding with tools and by hand as the spring weeds come up quickly.

Everything that has been in the ground for the last few weeks has been growing rapidly and we may start harvesting some of them soon.

With a little more growth over the next two days we will be harvesting arugula for the farmers market this Saturday. It has shot up in the last two weeks with the temperatures that it loves and that means it won’t be too spicy.

After a winter of slow growth, especially with the foggy December, it is great to see everything growing quicker and as every leaf on the plant gets larger the plants speed up their growth.

This warm weather likely means that all the spring crops will be coming a few weeks earlier than normal so its nice that we have multiple successions of all the veggies.

There may be shorter windows for when the spring veggies are at peak harvest but there still will be lots to harvest before we transition into summer crops.

It is a few days earlier than we planned but with this weather we might even get some tomatoes planted tomorrow. We are seeding a couple of trays of melons in the greenhouse which we will plant in the field in three to four weeks.