PLANTING OUT - PLANT - Growing Beautiful Food: A Gardener's Guide to Cultivating Extraordinary Vegetables and Fruit (2015)

Growing Beautiful Food: A Gardener's Guide to Cultivating Extraordinary Vegetables and Fruit (2015)

PLANT

PLANTING OUT

After allowing your soil-blocked seedlings to harden off for a few days, it’s time to transplant them into your beds. Do this on a cloudy day, as the UV light under the open sky is much stronger than anything your plants have experienced under glass, and they’ll struggle and go into shock if it’s too bright out. Be sure to know the last frost date for your zone and your particular area, so you don’t risk losing all of your seedlings in one fatal drop of the mercury. If you’ve planted out and a late frost is forecast, protect your seedlings with row cover—a double layer if necessary—to keep them insulated, or even a few bedsheets or newspaper, if that’s what’s available.

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To begin planting, mark where each seedling will go. (We use a 5-foot bamboo pole to draw lines in the soil and then punch a hole to mark each planting spot.) It’s important to mark out your seedbeds carefully before you plant, reading all of the cultural information on the seed packet about spacing and light. At Stonegate, we tend to plant closer than is suggested and triangulate our plantings so that we maximize space.

If we’re planting out kale seedlings, for example, and the suggested distance between plants is 18 inches, we’ll draw 5-foot rows in the bed that are perpendicular to its 25-foot length, spacing the rows 1 foot apart and leaving about ½ foot of space at each end. We’ll then mark out each of the 24 rows in an alternating 4:3 pattern, so that each plant in a row is occupying the space in between those in the next row. Depending on the plant and its needs, the pattern and spacing changes, but the triangular 1:2 relationship remains constant.

The number of plants needed for each bed can be calculated before you start your seedlings in early spring, but my advice is to always grow more than you think you’ll need. (We use our kitchen garden as a kind of dugout for relief seedlings that can be sent in to the farm should they be needed.) In the case of the kale bed, we would need 86 plants on a 4:3 scheme to fill the bed, but we might seed 100. Seeds are cheap, but the time it takes to start new ones comes with a price.

If your seedlings have been soil blocked, they can now be directly planted in the soil. Because potting mix is a different consistency than garden soil, I always throw a little of it into the planting hole to help the seedling acclimate. I’ll use a narrow trowel and make a hole slightly larger than the size of the soil block, add some mix, then water the hole before planting—this will help seedlings coming from the controlled conditions of a greenhouse or grow lights to get comfortable. Once the seedlings are planted, the entire bed is watered.

For the first few days, keep a close eye on your transplants. Water them regularly, and if it gets too sunny and hot and they’re looking faint (this can easily happen with lettuce seedlings in spring, as their leaves are thin and transpire quickly), cover them with row cover to reduce the effects of direct light and mitigate transpiration. If they flop at first, don’t panic: It’s just a bit of transplant shock. They’ll usually rally in a few days.

It’s not just light and moisture that are different once you move outside, but soil temperature, as well. Early spring greens and brassicas will not complain too much about the cooler ground, but heat lovers like tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers will throw a fit if planted in soil that’s too cool. These plants in the Solanaceae, or nightshade, family want soil that’s at least 60 degrees, and though ambient temperatures in late spring may reach that point, the soil will be much cooler. We cover our Solanaceae beds with a durable black landscape fabric in early spring that not only absorbs UV light and warms the soil beneath but also suppresses weeds in those beds while still allowing water to permeate. This fabric is kept on during the growing season; you cut slits in the fabric when it’s time for seedlings to be planted.

Seed starting—whether in a greenhouse or basement or in soil blocks or seeding trays—will get your growing season off to a great and early start, giving you a reliable sense of what you’ll be growing and a kind of anticipatory joy about the season ahead.

NOTES FROM THE WONDERGROUND

Heart of Glass

The greenhouse at Stonegate Farm has been transformed this month from a cool, empty glass box to a biosphere of warm green life taken over by the bustle of seed starting.

It’s Hope Central for the farm, a strange and wonderful refuge of genetic desire. The greenhouse is where you lay out your floral and vegetal longing in orderly blocks of soil, pinch in an improbable speck of seed, and say your prayers. Ora pro nobis.

Ideas incubate as well here: what to interplant this season, how much of this variety to grow, when to start that, how many successions you’ll need. You test-plant in coconut coir or start seeds under the cosmic pull of a full moon. You glaze young greens with an emulsion of fish and seaweed and imagine low tide. It’s all very seductive, to be inside this small ship of hope, when the gray and cold of late March are still clawing at the glass.

You have time to meditate on what you’re doing or what others before you have done. I’ve been researching biodynamics, for example. Developed by scientist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s, biodynamic farming looks for harmony between earth and sky, among soil, plant, and planet, and tries to score those forces into one resonant voice. This is no easy task, with all the dissonant pressure from pest and fungi acting against organic growing. But these ideas feel right here, and we’re doing our lyrical best to sound them out.

Sometimes you just do, without much thought. You pump iTunes through your brain to give rhythm and meter to the monotony of seed starting or hum a sacred dirge when thinning fragile and crowded cotyledons. Then you catch yourself reflecting on the meaning of growing food for yourself and others and why it matters.

This season, with the first expansion of the farm in 5 years, it’s a wonderfully crowded house. The cut flowers alone, preening beauties that they are, have laid claim to half the space, while the dozens of new vegetable varieties pack the aisles. Maybe we should crank some Green Day into this glassy mosh pit?

While I was away from the farm this winter, these plans were all virtual, scrawled out in journals and circled in dog-eared seed catalogs. My absence always seems to make the farm grow fonder. Even while winter storms gave us a climatic battering and kept me cursing the gods from far away, I couldn’t wait to pick up the farm and start all over again.

But that’s just part of why we do this. As gardeners, growers, and microfarmers, we always see things as we are, and if we’re joyful, hopeful souls, we’ll come back, happy to press our wills against the odds. For now, we’re in the greenhouse—the glassy, pulsing heart of the farm—and, despite the swirling snow and wind, we’re seeing things as we are.

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The greenhouse begins to bustle in March, when soil blocks and flats of wheat grass mark the beginning of the season.

Direct Seeding

Though I try to start almost everything I grow in my greenhouse, because it’s a predictable, controllable environment, there are some plants that are best planted directly into living soil.

Snap peas are one of the first seeds to go in the garden and tend to be planted in the thawing muck of middle March, followed by cold-hardy brassicas and greens. The usual caveat on a seed packet will be to plant “as soon as the soil can be worked in early spring,” which translates to that time when you’re no longer crunching through snow in your mukluks or forking over chunks of half-frozen ground.

There are two techniques I use for direct seeding. One is to use a small hand seeder and plant in rows, carefully tapping out the seeds and covering them lightly with soil. The other technique is broadcasting, where an entire 5 × 25-foot bed will be seeded by sowing seed directly from the packet and casting them evenly across a finely raked bed. Once I have an even amount of coverage, I use the back of the rake to very lightly cover the seeds and then water them in.

I have two or three beds each spring that I broadcast with a custom mix of loose-leaf lettuce, mustards, Asian greens, mizuna, and baby brassicas to grow a thick shag carpet of colorful cutting greens. These are harvested with a hand trimmer, which is like a large pair of scissors with a ratcheting handle that rotates 90 degrees. The bed of greens is harvested in sections, moving down its length as needed. Usually, by the time I’ve reach the last bit, the section from the first harvest has regrown and can be cut again.

I will also direct-seed in between longer-season annuals, particularly with quick, early growers like radishes, baby turnips, loose-leaf lettuce, spinach, and arugula. These will come and go throughout the season as the stalwarts stay put.

Thinning Seedlings

Once your seeds germinate, either under the shelter of a greenhouse or grow lights or outside, they will need to be thinned. You are usually planting more than one seed per cell or soil block as a hedge against spotty germination and planting more seeds per row in the garden than you can possible grow for the same reason. Though every seed is programmed to germinate and grow, not all seeds will develop, and some will just sit there and inexplicably do nothing. So you overplant, and thin, as a form of crop insurance.

In the wild, nature settles the score, and competition is fierce: Plants thrive or falter as conditions allow. On the farm, however, an environment is created to maximize the odds of survival. And as seedlings push their hopeful new leaves up from the dirt, most are quickly dispatched as we thin the beds.

It’s one of the most Machiavellian chores on the farm. No matter how careful you are when planting seed, particularly tiny dust-in-the-wind lettuce seed, overseeding is routine. Seedlings that will be allowed to grow to maturity are spared, and competing siblings that have sprouted around them are yanked out with a quick flick of thumb and index finger.

As seeds germinate in soil blocks or trays, they will also need to be reduced to one strong seedling per block or cell. Those that are direct-seeded should be thinned to their proper spacing. The weaker ones can be cut with small scissors just above soil level or carefully removed by hand. Remember that young seedlings have a very slight hold on the soil and that by carelessly removing the culls, you can pull out your chosen ones, as well. This is necessary but time-consuming work, particularly when you’re bent forward over densely germinated growing beds or seed trays for hours, delicately plucking out hair-thin growth.

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Interplanting

One of the fundamental organizing principles of small-scale farming is to make full use of your growing space. Because you don’t have a lot of land, every scratch of dirt is a potential root zone for something edible.

We don’t allow a lot of uncultivated dirt at Stonegate. We plant, interplant, succession plant, companion plant. Dirt—exposed and unused—is inefficient. If the natural world were to prevail over the imposition of agriculture, there would be no dirt visible. Every bit of soil would be colonized by something green, seeking a determined chance at life. A walk in the forest will bear witness to that.

The way we interplant diverse vegetables, herbs, and flowers at Stonegate in close, careful proximity means we also moderate soil temperatures, reduce weed pressure, and create relationships and dialogue between species that are mutually beneficial. When tall and leafy eggplants are shading Asian greens and cucumber trellises are sheltering tender arugula, or peppers are keeping a carpet of mesclun happy, I feel as though a true, democratic system is in place, where every plant has a voice. This is the kind of balance and harmony you’re after.

When we plant out cabbage in spring, for example, it takes about 2 months to mature, so in the row space parallel to the young seedlings, we’ll plant out a deep red ‘Lollo Rossa’ lettuce as well as purple bunching onions between each plant. This interplanted bed not only makes full and efficient use of growing space, but it is also a beautiful sight: the cool blue green cabbages accented by frilled purple lettuce and sharp spears of onion. The bed becomes a kind of rich, edible tapestry of color and form.

We interplant as often and as diversely as we can, and successions of greens are repeatedly planted or seeded beneath the shading leaves of larger plants throughout the season. Spinach and lettuce are grown under tall umbrellas of kale, for example, where they do well—even midseason—protected from the glare of the sun. Or radishes and Asian greens are tucked under the shade of rainbow-hued chard.

Mixed varieties of a single cultivar can also create stunning combinations when planted together. For example, planting the loose-leaf lettuce ‘Red Sails’, with its deeply lobed crimson leaves, next to the exuberant lime green frill of ‘Black Seeded Simpson’ creates an exciting bed of banded, alternating color.

Interplanting asks that you think like plants and figure out what they need culturally in terms of habit of growth, hours of light, soil, and water, and then grow them in the right spot, with the right crowd. But it also allows you to think like an artist and to imagine combinations of plants that are not only beneficial and sensible but beautiful.

It’s important to consider not only color, of course, but also form when combining plants. Plain leaf shapes look better next to those that are lobed or serrated; tall, frilly forms ally well with those that are stout; lanky, clambering plants are more defined when growing above an edging of something sprawling and low. In the cut flower farm at Stonegate, these combinations are more obvious, as flower cultivation—and arranging—is all about the right mix, but adding that same sensibility to the rest of your farm and garden will take it to a whole other level. When we started throwing color-saturated edible flowers into our salad mixes—on top of an already vibrant textural mix of greens—they became works of art.

Some of our favorite color combinations using both mixed and single cultivars on the farm include planting frothy bronze fennel in a bed with dusty gray cabbage and purple scallions (left); combining a pole bean like ‘Purple Pod’ twining on the same trellis with a bright yellow variety like ‘Anellino Giallo’; mixing together cherry tomatoes like ‘Sun Gold’ and ‘Black Cherry’; or fronting a trellis of bicolor tomatoes such as ‘Striped German’ with a purple basil like ‘Amethyst’. We have even chosen breeds of chickens for the colors of the eggs they lay, from the deep speckled brown spheres of Cuckoo Marans to the blue green jewels of Ameraucanas; a carton of eggs never looked or tasted so good. Combinations such as these—like perfectly mixed perennial borders in a lovely garden—are what growing beautiful food is all about.

It’s a joy to walk through your garden or farm and feel as though you’re walking through a thoughtfully curated space—a gallery of vegetables, fruit, and flowers with new exhibitions being put on every few weeks. Your landscape will become a living, nourishing, highly aesthetic environment that will change how you experience and appreciate food.

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Succession Planting and Crop Rotation

As with interplanting, succession planting aims to make the most of the space available for growing, while rotation guides the arrangement of crops from one season to the next. Succession planting means that the garden you’re tending as frost arrives in the fall looks different from the one you planted in early spring and possibly even from the one you cared for in midsummer. Crop rotation means that this year’s garden has a different configuration and possibly different crops than last year’s.

How much succession planting you’re able to do depends on the length of the growing season and the time your plants need to reach maturity. Crops grown in succession tend to be quick-growing plants that reach productive size, are harvested, and then are done. Vegetables that favor cool weather often lead the succession: leaf lettuce, mesclun greens, radishes, scallions, and peas don’t mind starting out early in spring, but they sulk in the heat of summer. We succeed cool-season leafy greens with more heat-tolerant Asian greens like bok choy, pak choy, mustards, and mizuna so there’s always a salad mix to enjoy—even in the swelter of August.

Rotation to manage fertility is a bit easier, since it deals with shorter time frames. The goal of this type of rotation is to precede nutrient-hungry (typically fruiting) crops like tomatoes, eggplant, and squash with soil-building nitrogen fixers such as peas and beans, and to follow those fruit-bearing plants with leafy crops and light-feeding root crops like carrots and onions. At Stonegate, we grow spring snap peas in beds that will be followed by tomatoes, for example, in order to give the soil a nitrogen fix.

If rotation is truly not possible, and you only have a few beds in your tight growing space that will work for heat- and sun-loving plants, there are a few other things you can do to reduce pressure from pests and disease. Mulching well is a start, as well as watering at ground level to reduce splashing, because bacterial spores and fungi can be easily spread through moisture. Keeping your beds as clean as possible throughout the season is also important, and particularly in fall: removing fallen leaves, stalks, and spent fruit is critical to reducing pressure from overwintering pests and disease.

Because we’re not able to rotate as much as we’d like to at Stonegate, we’re careful about our cultural practices and not only replenish exhausted soil regularly with compost, minerals, and nutrients but also foliar feed throughout the season with a fish-and-seaweed emulsion that builds strong, healthy plants. Like humans, the healthier the plant, the more resistant it will be.

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