Has anybody discovered a surprise out in their garden already?
I planted a whole ton of garlic last spring. Most of hadn’t sprouted by fall, so I figured it had rotted away. I shrugged and went, “Okay, guess that didn’t work. Now I know.”
Now that part of my garden suddenly has a whole bunch of garlic sprouts poking vigorously up through the snow! In January! I’m delighted, and I’m also really surprised. (Wry grin.)
My biggest surprise last year was a brussels sprouts plant that grew up in the middle of my zucchinis. A big massive one with three vigorous stems that didn’t seem to notice the summer heat or drought at all. I didn’t plant any brussels sprouts seeds last year! I planted some the year before, though . . .
I wonder how many more surprises will be popping up this year.
Oh, come to think of, those might be the garlic cloves I planted in fall!
See, I kept a bunch of garlic cloves in the fridge for awhile, having not gotten around to eating them for something like six months. In late fall, I noticed a lot of them had green sprouts poking out of the top. So I thought, “Okay, sure, I’ll put you out in the garden.”
I stuck them in a garden bed, and threw fall leaves on top of them, and promptly forgot about them.
If the sprouts that are out there right now are those, I guess they decided our not-quite-freezing temperatures for a few days running meant it was spring, having been in the cold in my refrigerator for such a long while. (Grin.)
Good to know that refrigerator vernalization works such a treat!
P.S. I also had an apple seed I kept moist in a little tupperware in the fridge for awhile. I was planning to plant it out. I forgot. In December, I noticed it had sprouted and had a huge taproot that was about six inches long. I went, “Oh, hey!” And we went outside and planted it and threw leaf mulch on top of it. Hope it lives!
So yeah, vernalization in the fridge definitely works. (Grin.)
My unheated greenhouse is currently producing food that I didn’t plant. Spinach, lettuce, bok choi, mallow. Weeds from various seed cleaning activities.
I have some Swiss chard alive after -14 F with little snow cover. Outer leaves are scorched but nice heathy looking growth in the middle. One plant looks barely touched at all. Will next year be my first ever success with chard seed?
I have seeds in my squash! Not a garden surprise but definitely a surprise. In 2021 my squashes didn’t have seeds in them, despite being watered once a week, and this year even the direct-seeded barely-watered ones seem to all have at least some viable seeds inside. Definitely a pleasant surprise.
I noticed my garlic sprouts were looking awfully yellow. I wasn’t sure if it was the wet, cold weather or something else, so I tried dumping a bunch of urine near them yesterday, in case they wanted fertilizer. I didn’t even bother to dilute it. The soil is so soggy from all our rain and snowmelt over the past week that I figured it was nutrient-leached already.
Oh, interesting! Now, that raises an interesting question. Do greater quantities of available fertilizer in the soil increase a plant’s cold tolerance?
I know I read somewhere that more fertilizer = less water that a plant needs, so maybe it helps with cold and heat tolerance, too. If so, that’d be neat.
I did an experiment where I mixed several carrot varieties and seeded them in late November to see if any would survive and produce seed in Spring. I’ve done no weeding and we got down to around 5°, so far the only ones alive are the purple carrots which I believe are a hybrid variety. I often do fruitless experiments like this for some reason.
That’s not fruitless! What you’re looking for is information, and by the time your experiment ends, you’ll have found it. It may be less than good news – such as, “I have now learned I can’t get away with this with any known carrot varieties” – but it’s still valuable.
Especially since anything that surprises you might be wonderful good news that changes everything about the way you grow that species.
Maybe you were doing an experiment with the garlic by planting it in the spring, but garlic does not usually do well if planted in spring. It can dry out; and if it does grow, it doesn’t produce nearly as much as when planted in late fall. I guess it’s possible that those spring planted cloves went dormant over summer and finally woke up now when the moisture came back, and also the cold temperatures which were needed to break dormancy.
I was doing an experiment, yeah. I’d heard that garlic is usually planted in the fall, but I wanted to see what would happen if I planted it in spring.
Now that I’ve seen how cold hardy it is, planting it in fall definitely makes sense from now on! I can plant it with all my other winter garden crops.
Question. How about true garlic seeds? Are those best sown in fall, or are those best sown in spring? I have a few, and I’m planning to see what they give me.
True garlic seeds! I’d like to get started with that some time too. I don’t know when they should be planted but I assume fall would be fine since they would naturally fall out of the seed head in early fall. I hope you get a successful seed garlic project going!
I actually bought them, years ago, from an Ebay seller! I had no idea back then how rare they were. So yeah, I’m dying to use them now and see what I get!
Garlic loves the cold. With a strong root system it will happily grow out of the snow. These were probably those you planted in the fall, or you would have seen them popping up as soon as it was cool enough.
Noticed a couple plants that I haven’t identified yet. I chopped ths garden area down so I can see these. They are probably all over and I haven’t noticed them as much.
That makes it another crop I can consistently have growing in my winter garden.
