Leeks, requiring anywhere from 75 to 125 days to reach maturity, are best planted very early. Gardening in a Zone 8 growing season, our winter temps often dip too low to have much success here by directly sowing them in the fall, so today I started mine.
I decided to use a couple of
Jiffy 12-Cell Mini Greenhouses because I'm not planning on growing a very large crop of leeks and the mini greenhouses fit so well on the window sill. So easy to use, all you do is add warm water.
Almost instantly, the pellets swell up and are perfect for planting.
I gently opened up the mesh cover on the top of each peat pellet with a fork once they had expanded in order to plant the seeds.
I planted three leek seeds per pellet, gently firmed the tops and then placed the dome top onto the mini greenhouse.
Once the leeks have sprouted, it should take a couple of months before they will have grown large enough to plant outdoors (about pencil sized) and by then, we will be well into spring. With several different varieties of carrots, a very good companion plant for leeks, planned for my garden, I will intermix my leek seedlings into my beds of carrots. Ready for harvest when they have reached about one inch in diameter, because the carrots are a faster maturing crop, there should be plenty of room available for the leeks to reach maturity.
I gently opened up the mesh cover on the top of each peat pellet with a fork once they had expanded in order to plant the seeds.
I planted three leek seeds per pellet, gently firmed the tops and then placed the dome top onto the mini greenhouse.
Once the leeks have sprouted, it should take a couple of months before they will have grown large enough to plant outdoors (about pencil sized) and by then, we will be well into spring. With several different varieties of carrots, a very good companion plant for leeks, planned for my garden, I will intermix my leek seedlings into my beds of carrots. Ready for harvest when they have reached about one inch in diameter, because the carrots are a faster maturing crop, there should be plenty of room available for the leeks to reach maturity.
Zone 8! Must be lovely. Here in zone 3/4 we don't have a long enough season to do much succession planting. Unless I wanted harvest after harvest of radishes!
ReplyDeleteAccording to the US National Arboretum hardiness maps at http://www.usna.usda.gov/Hardzone/hzm-nw1.html I'm actually a Zone 8a, but I don't take it down to the nth degree. The south, Texas through Georgia is also Zone 8. Puzzles me how we can be pretty much in the same zone, because it really is much colder here in the winter, and much hotter there in the summer.
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