Monday, February 15, 2010

Seed-Starting Central

Today, Tom started a couple of trays of parsley (both flat leaf and curly leaf).  Supposedly, the flat leaf has more flavor and is prized by chefs, but I can't tell any difference.  We will sell a lot of potted parsley plants at the farmers market this spring.  But, I will plant a lot of it in my herb garden and sell it in fresh cut form later in the summer.  Parsley seeds take a long time to germinate.  So, we needed to get these started early before we get into starting tomatoes and peppers.

I started some arugula and kale.  Arugula is also known as rocket or roquette and is popular in Italian cuisine.  It has quite a "bite" and is wonderful in salads.  Like most salad greens, Arugula is very low in calories and is high in vitamins A and C.  Kale has double your daily beta-carotene and 6 times of the recommended amount of vitamin K.  It’s also got plenty of vitamin C, calcium and potassium.  Kale can be used in salads when young, but also is good sauteed and cooked in soups.  Below we have arugula pictured on the left and Red Russian Kale (the variety I have) pictured on the right.

Most of the time today was spent getting organized for the season.  Below you can see our basic set-up.....a card table and some selves hung with fluorescent lights.  This is located in our small basement.  The lights are on timers.  Right now we are concentrating on cool-season vegetables; things that we can set out before the last frost date which on average is April 15 here.  In March we will start on tomatoes and peppers and these shelves will be full.

1 comment:

  1. Very good post. I really liked the nutrition information. I would love to read more like that on the backgrounds and reasons for different varieties. Also, Nathan wants to plant potatoes. When should we do that?

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