First outdoor planting of the year

I was going to call this “First planting of the season,” but I did plant some potatoes last fall as a bit of an experiment.  And I had planted some seeds in pots, but yesterday was the first time I planted something outside, this year.  I was also going to start by saying I planted seven things yesterday, but there are some grey areas, so I won’t try to number them.

First off, we are still about a month away from the last frost date for this area, but there’s also a week of good weather, which is rather rare this time of year, so I wanted to get something done.  But I will have to keep an eye on the overnight temperatures.  Also, our garden is damp, but hopefully it will dry enough this week that I can at least start on working it up.  We do have some small, raised beds, and that’s what I planted into.

There were three very simple things I planted: a short row of leaf lettuce, a couple of daisies, and a couple of marigolds.  These were all planted from seeds.  Everything else I planted were onions, which is where some of the grey areas come from.

First up, I think last fall one of my nieces sold boxes of fruit and vegetables as a school fundraiser for something.  In one of these boxes were some nice, fist-sized onions.  One day, a couple of months ago, I noticed that one of these onions had sprouted.  So I got a pot and planted it, and stuck it in with all the houseplants.  It grew, but I don’t think it was getting enough sun, so I planted it outside.  Hopefully, it’s the right type of onion for this area, and we’ll get something from it.

We normally plant onion sets, and that’s what we did last year.  I gathered our onions, dried them out, and put them in a mesh bag hanging in our cellar.  A month or so ago, I noticed that one of them had sprouted, so I put it in a pot.  It grew and I transplanted it yesterday.  But there were also twenty or so bulbs from last year still in the cellar.  Either we didn’t use as many onions this winter, or the fundraiser onions were more than enough.  So I just planted the rest of them as a new set. 

Now, as I said, we normally plant onion sets, but I was curious about trying onion seeds.  So I got a pack some time ago.  Wanting to get a head start on them, I planted some in pots back in February.  I also wanted to try biodegradable pots made from cardboard rolls, so I made a dozen of them and planted onion seeds.  But, either the seeds aren’t that good, or I didn’t water them enough, or it was too cold on the porch, or something else, or some combination, but only four plants sprouted.  So I planted those four, along with the other pots in case the seeds were just waiting for better conditions.  I also direct sowed some of remaining onion seeds. 

I guess this is another grey area.  In two of these cardboard tubes, some non-onion seeds grew.  I’m not sure what they are, but I planted them to see what they become.  And incase the onions I did plant in them ever come up.

So that’s the beginning of my 2023 outdoor gardening.