Solar Gardening by Leandre Poisson

Author:Leandre Poisson [Poisson, Leandre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781603581233
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2010-01-24T22:00:00+00:00

One of the oldest ways to winnow seeds is to shake them out of a basket onto a tarp or blanket on a breezy day. The heavier seeds drop onto the cloth, while the light chaff blows away.

BIENNIALS

The root vegetables form the largest and most familiar group of biennial plants in the garden. Carrots, beets, parsnips, salsify, turnips, and rutabagas all need to experience a period of chilling, at temperatures between 32º and 50ºF., to trigger their flowering mechanism in their second season of growth. In the southern and moderate zones, these root vegetables can remain in the ground over the winter, surviving quite nicely under a light mulch. In the North, gardeners should mulch these crops more heavily in the late fall or dig them up and store them in a root cellar until spring, at which time the roots can be replanted in the garden and allowed to go to seed. During the second season’s growth, gardeners in all areas should cage the best specimens and introduce flies or bees as pollinators.

Celery, celeriac, endive, chicory, and parsley are biennials as well and need a similar period of cold dormancy before putting out a flower stalk in the second growing season. If you plan to save seeds from these crops, you will need to cage them in the same manner as the root crops listed above.

The best way to winter-over hardy biennials like cabbage and brussels sprouts in the southern and moderate zones is to leave them in the ground and either mulch them heavily or cover them with a solar appliance to protect them from prolonged hard freezing. As the weather warms in the following spring, pull back the blanket of mulch and cut shallow slits in the cabbage head to allow the seed stalk to emerge. Cauliflower and kohlrabi are both biennials that cannot tolerate much freezing. In the southern and moderate zones, they should reach maturity in early winter, remain in cool dormancy for the remainder of the season (protected with mulch if necessary), and go to seed in the spring. Northern gardeners who want to try growing any of these cole crops for seed should pull the plants up (roots and all), store them over the winter, and replant them in the spring at a deeper level than they were growing before. All of these vegetables will need to be isolated from other plants of the same type and have flies introduced into their cages as pollinators.

Onions represent another class of biennials, one that is easy to propagate for seed. Select the best individuals when harvesting onions, then store them through the winter and plant them the following spring. In the southern zone, this process is fairly continuous. If you leave a mature onion bulb in the ground, it will automatically start going to seed. Once you have selected and replanted the best onions, you will have to cage them and introduce flies as pollinators, since all the members of the onion family will cross-pollinate with one another.

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