Grow Better Veggies

Fennel in Fall

Read through to find out how you can get a free packet of Love Apple Farm's biodynamically-grown fennel seed.

Fennel is a fabulous vegetable that forms a bulb above the soil surface, and can be grown year round in milder climates.  The bulb has a licorice flavor to it, and the seed is widely used to spice-up sausages and pasta sauces.  It can be directly sown in the garden, or started in flats in the greenhouse (or in a makeshift one in your laundry room or garage...but more about that later).

I normally wouldn't chance sowing fennel directly in the garden in late October.  That's because here at Love Apple Farm, in central California, it would not be warm enough to have the seeds germinate.  However, the weather report this morning encouraged me to give it a shot.  The forecast is for the next week to be sunny and warm.  So I'll give it a try.  If it works, great.  If it doesn't, I'll just pop some other transplants into that bed later.

As you can see in the picture below, I have some fennel already up and growing strong.  We've been harvesting it for the restaurant, in fact, and now I have a half bed empty in which to put some more fennel. 

Elsewhere in the garden, I have another half bed which I direct sowed about five weeks ago, and you can see below that it's merrily growing.  See the bare patch?  That's just an area that didn't germinate.  If I wanted, I could add some more seed and try again in the bare patch, but I think I'll just let that be for now.  This new patch of fennel will need to be thinned soon, and the chef will love to see those thinnings in his delivery.  One of the nice things about having your own restaurant garden is that you can get things never found at a farmer's market.  In this case, it's the tiniest of baby fennels.

But I digress, let's get back to sowing a new bed of fennel.  First, let's have a little tutorial on how fennel seed can be saved and used.  I had a bed of fennel this past summer that didn't bulb up, it just went straight to a bolt.  "Bolting" means that instead of forming it's edible part slowly and nicely, a vegetable plant will send up its flower spike.  In the case of fennel, the bulb at the base of the soil never developed, but the plant began to reproduce anyway, and sent up a bunch of lovely upside-down umbrella-like flowers. 

Pricking out Lettuces

In horticulture lingo, the phrase “pricking out” is not just something Beevis and Butthead would chortle over, it  means “to pot up tiny sprouted seedlings into a slightly larger container”  It’s different from the horticulture term “to transplant,” in that the latter generally means to plant something from a container into the ground. 

I sowed four different lettuces on September 24 (two varieties per flat).  Each flat holds eight 6-packs.

I  generally sow more seeds than are necessary, because seeds are cheap, and re-sowing seeds that don't sprout can set you back a couple of sometimes crucial weeks.  If all goes well, and germination is good, that means that I’ve got too many of any one thing, and I need to separate the m and give them more space.

As I was teaching my prick out method to my fine assistant, Christopher, he asked me the obvious question, “Why can’t we just transplant these babies directly into the ground?  Why do we need this interim step, which will take a lot longer?”  Christopher’s always asking questions when he’s not belting out a song that he thinks summarizes what I’ve just taught him.  The tune he chose after this tutorial was Lionel Richie’s “Once, Twice, Three Times a Lady,” (you’ll see why at the end).

I told him to shut up and get his hands dirty (not really).  Rather, I patiently explained that the babies were way too little to put out in the cruel, wet, rainy world right now, and that even the littlest earwig could take it down with one munch.  However, since the tiny lettuces were too crowded in their little cells, they would need more room to grow before they were transplanted out into the garden proper to fend for themselves. 

Here’s our technique:

We pop the cell out of the tray 6-pack.  These little lettuces were sown almost 3 weeks ago.  This variety is called “Oakleaf.”  Wonderfully tasty.  There seem to be about 10 babies jammed together here.  We start to separate them by pulling apart the root ball.  Don’t try to separate by holding the too-tender tops.