Variables

I’ve been experimenting a little bit with variable growing conditions to see what works better for certain seeds. These experiments are pretty flimsy, as I have enough difficulty keeping track of just one planting, but nonetheless I can make a few observations thus far. Take Hopi beans, which I planted a month ago — half a dozen in small plastic pots and another half dozen in one large ceramic pot. I suspect beans may not be ideal for containers, and the two beans I started with last year went directly into the large bed, later in the year, so perhaps this is all doomed from the start. But in any case… I kept one of the small pots in the house while heading out of town for a week, and upon return found it had skyrocketed up nearly a foot, energized by the warmer temperature of the house. I started bringing it outside during the day, though, and the stem bent just above the unifoliolate leaves; the plant was dead in a matter of days. Since then I’ve been bringing one of the small pots in the house at night, and it is the biggest of everyone, with a sizeable first trifoliolate leaf and more emerging. The unifoliolate leaves of the other small pots look less healthy than those in the big pot (which is huddled with other large pots near the shed, likely keeping it a little warmer at night). So I suppose this may just confirm that these beans should be planted later in the season, directly in the bed.

My saved fava beans are now three months old, and all flowering. I’ve done a mix of older and newer beans, in different boxes, but the most easily observable variance comes from spacing. The favas in the big box, a mix of old and new, have more room, and they’ve produced both more stalks and larger leaves (some as long as five inches), and maybe even more flowers per cluster — six or seven? The other boxes have smaller leaves (maybe three inches at most), single stalks, and more like five or six flowers per cluster (although I’m not being meticulous about the count). I’ll have to see if bean size follows suit.

Last year, I had surprising success with Manoa lettuce when starting large volumes of seed in a tiny wooden planter box, and then transplanting them into a larger box. That tiny box was old and had suffered termite damage, so I built a new one and repeated last year’s process. These seeds are coming along nicely, compared to the one-seed-per-cell tray effort I started a week earlier (those poor guys got leggy during my trip out of town, and never made it). In contrast to the wooden box, seeds I planted in a pot by the shed just one week later are struggling to get going, which is kind of fascinating.

The question now is when to transplant the lettuce from the tiny box into a bigger one. Last year I didn’t transplant until May 31, but I don’t think the seedlings I have now are going to wait until then. On the other hand, the slugs still seem pretty active, and may lay waste to anything I put in there too soon. I’ll probably need to transplant in batches over time — maybe three or four total, one every two or three weeks? Another variable to track.