A Cooperative Learning Project
One of the hardest things for me to do in gardening is to sacrifice some plants for the good of others. Last Saturday we did a first pass of thinning some of the vegetable seedlings. So sad to have to pull up valiant healthy seedlings so that other seedlings could have more room to thrive.
I think that these might be beet seedlings after the thinning.
So last Saturday I brought some plastic noodle soup bowls to be used for cutworm collars, intending to cut out the the bottoms to create plastic collars. However, I was advised that cutworms collars are needed when the seedlings are fragile, so I didn’t install them. Later, it occurred to me that since this is an educational garden, I should install them anyways (as a conversation piece). It turns out I didn’t have enough soup bowls, so we installed them on some of the cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower plants, particularly the more struggling ones. As a plus, it was pointed out that the collars help to water those particular plants by cupping the water.
The collard greens’ tiny sprouts have broken through, on schedule, as have those of both their neighbors, the Swiss chard and the kale. The Swiss chard’s two seed leaves are elongated, like little green bananas. The two seed leaves for the collard greens and kale, their close cousin, are quite circular, more like Mickey Mouse’s ears.
There are lots of those tiny shoots poking their heads up out of the soil. They look adorable. And the kids who walk past the Garden on the way to school seem to take delight in them.
We’ll start thinning these seedlings pretty soon. We don’t want them crowding each other. So the Reaper comes soon. We’ll thin them out, saving only the most promising, leaving the survivors spaced maybe just an inch from one another. That’s just the first thinning. There will be more. As soon as leaves come close to touching, out comes the weaker-looking of the two.
If I understand this right, at some point we’ll end up with collards standing as much as 2 feet from one another.
I grew up thinking I hated lettuce. Every night my sister and I argued over who had to make the salad- tomatoes that tasted like cardboard, cucumbers (which I still don’t particularly like), and iceberg lettuce. I ate it, but I never particularly enjoyed it. Once I got out on my own, I discovered that there was lettuce that was not iceberg, which made salad much more interesting. I still was not a big fan, however. It took a vacation to Hawaii to turn me around. We were visiting friends of ours who lived near Honolulu, and we went to the farmers’ market that is right behind Diamond Head. Our friend bought a big bag of arugula, and we went home and made a salad. Just arugula and some oil and vinegar. Wow- I had never tasted anything like it. It turns out that the world of lettuce and greens beyond iceberg is large and varied, and I can now happily eat salad just for the greens, without adding much of anything to cover up the boring lettuce base. I’m still partial to arugula, but there is all kinds of lettuce that is mighty tasty .
I missed planting day, which was last Wednesday. The seedlings look strong (the first few days are critical to seedlings — either they take, or they don’t, in which case they wilt obviously). At first I didn’t even know they had been planted, as there was a single sign for that bed saying "Cauliflower". I did think it was a lot of cauliflower, but was later informed that the bed contained broccoli and my adopted cabbage as well. They sure look alike! Although one person pointed out, the seedlings with red stems were probably the red cabbage. I was a bit concerned that we didn’t have cutworm collars, which we from the AFC garden used in the past with cabbage, but I had an idea of something I might bring next week to use for cutworm collars.
