Vegetable Gardening (38 page)

For easier germination of small carrot seeds, try purchasing pelleted seeds.
These seeds are covered with a biodegradable coating, making the seed larger and easier to handle. However, the seed germination isn't affected. Sprinkle carrot seeds on the top of the soil and then cover them with a thin layer of potting soil or sand. Potting soil and sand are lighter than garden soil, enabling tender seedlings to more easily grow through.

Keep your soil moist.
If it dries, the seedlings can quickly die. (See Chapter 15 for more on watering.)

Grow carrots as a fall crop, starting 1 to 2 months before your first frost date.
They germinate faster in the warmer soil of summer, and their flavor is sweeter when they mature in cooler fall weather. In hot-summer areas, you may need to shade your newly sown soil with a shade cloth; hot soil temperatures hinder proper seed germination. (The appendix has more on frost dates.)

If your carrot tops break off during harvest (some always do), use a garden fork to dig up their roots. Pull the largest carrot roots first to leave room for the smaller roots to fill out. And if you can't eat all your carrots before the first freeze, lay a 6- to 8- inch-thick layer of hay or straw over the carrot bed. This layer of protection will keep the soil thawed, allowing you to go out on a winter's day and harvest fresh carrots right until spring.

If you're really hungry for carrots and can't wait until they fully mature, you can harvest young carrots anytime after the roots have formed. They just won't taste as sweet unless you grow the baby types.

Growing onions

The simplest way to grow onions is from a set or plant. But you can also directly sow onion seeds in spring, 2 weeks before your last frost date, or start them indoors 8 weeks earlier. For a fall planting of onions, start seedlings indoors or buy transplants. Plant the onion plants 4 to 6 weeks before the first frost. If you're starting your own seeds for a fall planting, start them indoors 8 weeks earlier.

If you start onions indoors, keep the plants stocky and short; whenever they get long and straggly, cut the tops with scissors so the plants are 3 inches tall. Trimming encourages better root growth and keeps the plants at a manageable size. Keep the seedlings moist and grow them under lights (Chapter 13 has more on growing seedlings indoors). Then
harden off
the transplants — gradually introduce them to the outdoor growing environment by bringing them outside for longer amounts of time each day for up to 1 week; then plant them 4 to 6 inches apart.

What makes onions pungent or sweet? The sulfur, not the sugar. Sweet onions have less sulfur than pungent varieties, so they taste sweeter. Even though the sulfur can make the onion more pungent, it also makes those varieties great storage onions. To keep your sweet onions as sweet as they can be, don't apply any sulfur fertilizers. Also keep the onion plants stress free by controlling weeds and making sure that the plants receive enough water and fertilizer (such as 5-5-5). If you do so, they will thrive and be sweet.

You can harvest onions anytime if you want scallions or small, baby onions, but for the largest bulbs, wait until about 80 percent of the tops have naturally started to fall over. Pull the bulbs out on a dry day if possible and then let them dry out in a warm, shady spot. For more on harvesting, see Chapter 19.

Producing potatoes

Potatoes are mostly grown from seed potatoes, which are either small potatoes or larger ones cut so that each piece has two
eyes
(those small indentations on a potato's skin). Eyes are dormant buds from which roots and shoots grow. Plant pieces about 8 to 10 inches apart in rows.

Don't try to plant potatoes that you purchase from a grocery store. These spuds have been treated with a chemical sprouting inhibitor, so they either won't grow any plants or the plants will be weak and not productive. It's best to purchase seed potatoes from a mail-order catalog, nursery, or garden center.

In this section, I describe essential techniques for growing potatoes.

Protecting your taters with the hilling technique

If you weed your root crop patch, mulch it with hay or straw, and water it well, crisp roots will be yours for the taking in no time. However, potatoes do require one more special technique, called hilling.
Hilling
is the technique of mounding up the soil with a hoe around the plants as they grow (see Figure 6-2). Hill at least twice during the growing season — about 1 week after the leaves emerge from the soil and again 2 to 3 weeks later. Hilling promotes the production of bigger potatoes and more of them, kills weeds, and keeps the sun off the tubers.

After your final hilling, lay a 3- to 4-inch-thick layer of hay or straw around your potatoes. Not only will this layer reduce the amount of weeding you do the rest of the summer, but it also will keep the soil cool and moist — perfect tuber-forming conditions! This layer also helps create larger tubers with fewer problems, such as
hollow heart
(when the center of the potato is hollow due to moisture stress).

Any direct sun on potatoes causes chlorophyll to form, turning the potato skins green and giving them an off taste. Tubers actually are mildly poisonous after they've formed chlorophyll, but you'd have to eat a truckload to really get sick. Keep the potatoes hilled and mulched when in the ground, and store them in the dark after harvest to avoid this problem. If you have a small green patch on your potato, just cut if off; the rest of the tuber is fine to eat.