Presidents' Day morning, the first day of mid-winter recess, the basement smelled like wet seed-starting mix and coffee. Mateo was still asleep. I had three onion packets, one leek packet and a celery packet lined up on the folding table like a lesson plan, and I'd promised myself everything would be sown before lunch.
It was, mostly. Here's how round two of February break sowing went.
Onions again, but more of them
Last year I sowed onions during this same break, on February 17, and grew 60 of them at the end of the west bed. They were good onions but small, most barely bigger than a golf ball. Part of that was crowding, since the peppers shared that bed and leaned over them by July. Part of it, I suspect, was me being stingy with fertilizer.
This year the onions get half of the east bed, right beside the garlic I planted in October, because the tomatoes are rotating into the west bed. I'm aiming for about 90 plants, so I sowed extra. Three varieties: a yellow storage onion, a red one, and Ailsa Craig, a big sweet onion that doesn't keep but is wonderful sliced raw in June.
The method is basically last year's, because it worked, just in full-size flats. I fill a 10-by-20 flat with damp Espoma Seed Starter, press shallow rows across it with the edge of a ruler about 2 inches apart, and drop seeds into the rows roughly a quarter inch apart. Yes, that's thick. Onions don't mind company as seedlings, and it saves shelf space. A thin layer of mix goes over the top, then a mist of water and a clear dome.
Each flat got about 160 seeds, and there are two flats of onions this year. Even if germination isn't perfect, that's plenty to choose 90 good ones in April and send the rest home with kids from the after-school garden club.
The leek, which should be easy
Leeks are grown almost exactly like onions from seed, just slower, so they got the same treatment in half a flat. One variety, about 60 seeds. I want maybe 20 plants for fall soup. The plan is to tuck them into a narrow row wherever there's room in late April and pile soil up around the stems as they grow, to get a long white shank. Whether there will actually be room is a question for April.
The celery, which probably won't be
Celery is one of my three gambles this year, and I've read enough to be nervous. The seed is so small it looks like ground pepper. It needs light to germinate, so it can't be covered. It's slow, often two or three weeks to come up. And the seedlings want steady moisture the whole time.
So it got its own small flat, sown thinly across the surface and pressed in with a flat hand, not covered at all. Celery germinates best on the cool side, around 65 to 70 degrees, so it's on the shelf under a dome rather than on the heat mat. I'm misting it twice a day. If I get eight healthy plants out of it, I'll call that a win. If I get none, it was a $3 lesson.
Haircuts until April
Onion and leek seedlings come up looking like a crowd of thin green hairpins, each one bent over with the black seed coat still stuck on top like a tiny hat. Within a couple of weeks they straighten into a little lawn. Once they reach about 5 inches, I give them a haircut back to 3 inches with kitchen scissors, held over a bowl so the clippings don't scatter. It keeps them sturdy and stops them flopping over each other. Mateo thinks the haircuts are the funniest part of gardening and wants to do them himself this year. He's ten. I'm considering it.
The clippings smell like mild scallions, and last year they went into scrambled eggs. This year too.
The flats are on the middle tier under the new third shop light, which is the whole reason I bought it. The sweet peas I started on February 7 are just beginning to come up on the tier above, pale shoots with folded leaves. Peppers are next, on March 1, and they'll get the heat mat all to themselves.
On Saturday my mother is driving up from Yonkers with her good knife for sofrito day. The house is going to smell like onions in two completely different ways this week.
