Friday, April 16, 2010

"Instant" garden! The benefits of transplants!

Here in Lancaster County, PA, the weather's been beautiful lately!
Over Wednesday and Thursday (the 14th & 15th) we've been able to accomplish a lot of work in the garden like transplanting, planting seeds, weeding, tilling, etc.

Today's post mostly covers the work a friend from Allentown and I did on Wednesday. Enjoy!

The day dawned early with very heavy fog.
Notice how the fog is only rising off the corn field (further away),
which has bare dirt exposed, and not the hay field (the closer, greener one)?


My helper, Daniel, arrived ready for work with his sister who spent the day helping my wife in the house.
He has his own publishing company (Salem Ridge Press), with which he publishes a lot of great books!

We planted lettuce, broccoli, and cabbage from these trays,
which hold 125 plants each.

There's a lot of open space to fill yet - one plant at a time!

Plant it properly...

A romaine head at approximently 3-4 weeks.

The garden looks so lush right now with the everything growing so well.
I love spring!

It's time to turn the rye into the ground as fertalizer.
The nieghbor came over and mowed it down for me,
and I later rototilled it into the soil.

We planted two very long rows of green, yellow, and purple beans.
Those little seeds look so innnocent right now, but they're going to turn into
plants that will take hours and hours to pick!

The day's been a very profitable one!

We planted approximately:
850 Lettuce Heads
900 Broccoli & Cabbage Plants

 Thanks for checking out our blog and feel free to leave a comment if you enjoyed it!
~ Jonathan Einwechter

2 comments:

  1. Love the pictures! Do you plant the rye specifically to act as a fertilizer? Also I'm not sure if stink bugs have made it to Lancaster yet but they are all over the place here. If you have them do they do any damage to your crops? How do you control them?

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  2. I'm glad you liked the photos! Yes, we plant the rye for fertilizer; it adds a lot of organic matter and nitrogen to the soil.
    Stink bugs (also called squash bugs) have definitely made in to Lancaster County, but thankfully were not too bad last year. (During my first year of farming, they whipped out my part of my squash.) Probably the best way to control them is simply to knock them off into a container of water. That's what we do for the similar sized Colorado Potato Beetle.

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