After months of cold it’s finally starting to feel like spring, and we couldn’t be happier to hear spring peepers peeping and wood frogs clucking in the pond and retention basins. The perennial crops like sorrel and rhubarb are popping up in the garden, and the Apple Bank is full of new spring bulbs. Soon cheerful daffodils and vibrant tulips will bloom, along with crocus, fritillaria, Spanish bluebells, allium and more.
Over the past few weeks, staff and volunteers have been busy getting the garden ready for the 2025 growing season. Indoors we’ve started over 3,000 seeds to plant out this spring and summer. This year’s lineup includes returning garden favorites like tomato ‘Sun-Gold’ and swiss chard ‘Prismatic Rainbow,’ as well as some new varieties including African horned kiwando and jewel of opar.
Outside, the entire garden got a top dressing of a few inches of well broken down compost. Especially the potato and carrot beds where staff will work the compost into the soil before planting.
Trying Two Approaches to Carrot Germination
We’re trying a few different things with the carrots this year. Carrot seeds are famously difficult to germinate because the delicate seeds can’t dry out once they are in the ground. It can also be difficult to space them out, which can mean hours of thinning later in the season.
In two beds we’re using boards to keep the soil moist. This is an old carrot-germinating trick and the idea is that, once you’ve watered the seeds you place a board over top the soil to hold in moisture. You can see our carrot boards in action in the garden, and so far they seem to be working! Carrots take a long time to germinate – up to three weeks – so we’re keeping an eye on the rows. Once we see tiny carrot seedlings, we’ll pull the boards to allow the delicate plants to come up.
In two other spots in the garden we mixed our carrot seeds with radish seeds. Carrots may be slow, but radishes are fast. Some can germinate and yield a crop in as little as 18 days. The idea behind mixing the two seeds together is that the radishes will help space out the carrots. Since the radishes are so quick to yield they’ll germinate and grow a crop before the carrots even appear. That way you can harvest your radishes, then grow your carrots in the same space with less thinning. There are no boards covering that part of the garden because radishes germinate in as little as four days, so we’ll water that patch the old-fashioned way!
Crocus were the first to bloom on the Apple Bank. Keep your eyes out for cheerful daffodils, fritillaria, Spanish bluebells, allium and more!
Our crafting volunteers carefully painted boards we laid atop our freshly sown carrot seeds to keep the soil moist.
Two New Solutions for Moisture Retention in Our Raised Beds
We also gave our standing raised beds a bit of a makeover. These spaces are used by field trips and summer camp students as areas where the kids can explore and taste some of what we’re growing in the garden. The trouble with standing raised beds is that they tend to dry out fast in the summer heat. So we’re using two strategies to keep them cool and moist.
The first is that we put up posts in each corner so that when the hot humid days set in we can add some light shade cloth. A little shade on the soil will keep these plants cooler and hold in water.
We’ve also added homemade Ollas. An Olla is an unglazed terracotta pot that you bury in the soil of the garden. The top side has a hole which you use to fill the pot with water. Because of the principal of soil-moisture tension (essentially that water travels through soil from areas of high water concentration to low) the water inside the pot will diffuse out into the soil and keep the garden moist.
We made our own Ollas using two small terracotta pots, placed one of top of the other. This way we can fill these homemade Ollas with water and keep the raised beds moist during dry spells.
We’ve got lots of great stuff still to come in the next few weeks. We’re eagerly anticipating the flush of blooms on the Apple Bank, and there are already seedlings hardening off in the cold frame to plant out in the garden. Soil temperatures in the beds where we turned a few inches of compost into the soil to seed carrots and beets are reading 55 degrees Fahrenheit measured three inches down. So we’re excited to see crops start to germinate and grow.
Stop by and visit next time you’re at Tyler. Our gardeners would love to show you around and celebrate all the wonderful signs of spring.
Finished Ollas ready to assist with moisture control in our raised beds.
An Olla before we buried it in the soil.
