Rain, then heat while we seed onions for the Spring

The few days of cooler weather this weekend was so nice although it never lasts long enough as the temperatures have climbed back up into the mid-90s.

There even was a light drizzle of rain on Saturday which was a pleasant surprise and the plants liked it.

All the summer crops are going to speed up their ripening a little bit as it gets hotter while the fall veggies need more water to not become too stressed.

We were planning on transplanting many trays yesterday of lettuce and raddicchio among other things but are going to be holding off until tomorrow.

The plants are able to get adjusted a little bit more to the temperature and hopefully they won’t be even more stressed than they already get when they are transplanted.

Delaying them for too long also isn’t ideal as they become rootbound in the trays and that causes them to be stressed which is very hard for them to recover from when transplanted.

In addition to our weekly seeding of lettuce, we seed more broccoli, cabbage and the second round of bunching greens in the greenhouse. These bunching greens won’t be ready to harvest until November likely but it will give us a chance to let the first planting grow back in the cooler days while we harvest off the second one.

Making up the other half of what we seeded in the greenhouse was the onions which we overwinter. These onions take much longer to grow than ones that are planted in the spring but have a more milder flavor.

Last year we planted them a little later than we wanted so this year we moved up the seeding date so hopefully they are in the ground earlier and are able to grow more before the coldest parts of winter.

Even though it was just two weeks ago that we planted the first lettuce and brassicas of the fall we’ve already weeded them multiple times. The first two times we used a tine weeder which gently disturbs the soil and hopefully kills the weeds right at the surface before they have really formed rooted.

Yesterday we trialed a finger weeder in the brassicas that we are borrowing from the UC Cooperative Extension office in Woodland which has a tool lending library. It is so great to have resources like that near us setup by the organic and small farms advisor Margaret Lloyd who has being such a wealth of information for us and many farms in the area.