I’ll give you ten guesses to name the plants sprouting in the seed tray in the photo below.
Give up? The big sprouts in the foreground are going to be artichoke plants, and behind are red tatsoi and Chinese cabbage.
This time of year, I delight in starting seeds for my edible garden. And since I’m presenting this week on perennial vegetables at the big Northwest Flower & Garden Festival, I’ve been paying closer attention to those crops. I’ve never started artichokes from seed before, so I decided this would be the year. It’s one of those crops that needs rejuvenating with new plants every five years or so anyway.
There’s a joy in opening a seed packet and sprinkling a few tiny, hard specks into a light, sandy soil and waiting for them to spring to life. It seems impossible, one sneeze would send them flying. But there it is, my future meal, which will be available to me with merely a trip out to the yard this summer. No drive to the store, no bags, no checkout stand. Just shake off the soil and walk back to the kitchen.
It could be argued that I’m overly focused on food. But in my defense, my favorite way to feed my omnivorous appetite comes from this process of planting, growing and harvesting. It is a progression as old as human existence, and I am a gatherer of leaves, roots, flowers and fruits. I’m a bit of a hunter, too—of the pests that want to consume my veggies before I get them.
Starting seeds has become an annual, late winter meditation.
I plug in a seedling heat mat to warm a tray of seeded soil and set a grow light system over it to deliver lumens to the sprouted seeds, supplementing what comes in through the windows. Our gloomy winter climate and northern latitude don’t really cut it. In this way, I get a start on my vegetable garden before the soil and the weather will allow me to plant outdoors.
It’s an iterative process and it is based on what crops I will be able to set out first.
I start with salad, a rainbow of lettuces and Asian mustards and stir-fry greens.
Then I move to the Brassica family of kale, broccoli and cabbage while preparing the garden soil for root crops. Due to their taproot nature, they go straight into the ground rather than a seed flat.
Once the soil is warm enough and the carrots and beets are sorted and sown, it’s time for tray-sprouting the warmer season crops: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant.
By the time they are spreading their leaves under our lengthening days, the ground is warm enough to plunge my fingers into it with plump bean, corn and squash seeds.
Finally, as summer tantalizes, I break out the seed packets of the winter crops, some of which have to be in the garden all through the fall to give us homegrown produce at Thanksgiving dinner.
Spreading out the seeding tasks over the course of the spring nicely feeds my urge to get back into the garden.
Those of you who stock your kitchen by pushing the cart through the supermarket are thinking I am crazy. And you are right. But I come from farming stock, so maybe that explains it.
Over the years I’ve found many locations to practice my obsession, from community garden plots to food bank gardens to my own home vegetable patch. Seed swaps and neighborly sharing spread the love.
I’ve been writing about growing food for many years in various publications, and every season my process spurs me to share new techniques. Then, I try to bring to life the concepts I’ve written about in garden books and magazine articles in front of other gardeners at garden shows and other event presentations.
My upcoming talk at the festival this week is on Saturday, Feb. 17, bright and early at 9:30 a.m. It’s called “Perennial Vegetables, Easy Fruit and Hardy Herbs: Set ‘em and Forget ‘em.” I must admit that the title comes with a little hyperbole. If you’re in Seattle and want to spend a weekend day looking at display gardens, browsing hundreds of booths at the trade show and sitting in on some gardening talks, c’mon down to the Seattle Convention Center. This show is huge, one of the biggest in the country in fact, and has a reputation for delivering the goods to gardeners eager for spring.
If you can’t make it, you might be interested in seeing me demonstrate some of the techniques in my own garden in a video class. I created one for Craftsy.com and it was a lot of fun. We spent a week in my garden and filmed dozens of hours of footage, which they edited down to two hours of class time, split into seven segments.
It’s called “The Extended Harvest: Vegetables for Every Season” and it complements my book Cool Season Gardener: Extend the Harvest, Plan Ahead and Grow Vegetables Year Round.
Note to North Dakotans: that book was not written with you in mind. Sorry.
So once again, as the year picks up speed, I’m feeding my perennial obsession. And if you come visit my garden after I’m underway, I’ll show you that my homegrown grocery store is nothing to sneeze at.
What would life be without homegrown tomatoes?