Mid Spring Is Bowie Time

This is my favorite part of spring, when planning is just beginning to move into execution out in the garden and the greenhouse is starting to overflow. There's still huge promise to everything and nothing has died or been diseased yet. All my big garden dreams are still possibilities, and so far I haven't fucked anything up. I'm still sure this will be the season everything goes really well and I get gorgeous plants and healthy fruits & veggies. I can still be a contender! Hahaha, yeah, it's a weird time.

This is the part of the season when I both repot my greenhouse seedlings into bigger containers until it's time to move them outside, and also shore up all the seedlings planted directly in the garden so they can develop strong stems. It's all basically about burying plants up to their necks.

That poor stem on the left needs support. On the right, a well supported stem.

In the greenhouse or garden, in order to keep new stems strong, you need to plant them low in the pot/hole and fill the soil up to the secondary leaves (their "necks"). If you don't do this, your plants will not develop strong enough stems and you'll get willowy plants that fall over. In the greenhouse, you do this when seedlings get those secondary leaves and start to outgrow their small pots. I move them into larger pots (4") and when I do this, I push them down low in the pot and fill the pot up to their necks with soil. Basically, half the stalk is now underground. When things are growing directly in the garden, though, you have to add soil to the plants on the ground to cover their stems. It's the difference between pushing plants down and building soil up. Either way, you're providing support for growing stems.

Potatoes buried up to their necks

If you've ever grown potatoes, you'll know what I'm talking about. You plant the potatoes in furrows and keep adding soil to the top as they grow up. But you actually should do this for all seedlings at first to give them a strong start. I like to use a garden soil that has a fertilizer built in for this, just to give the plants an extra boost. You follow that up with mulch all around the plants to keep out weeds, keep in moisture, and provide continuing support. And that is how your garden grows. Or mine, at least.

Anyhow, while I'm doing this every year, I'm singing David Bowie. I can't help it. I have no idea whether the expression of being buried up to your neck in something comes from this gardening technique (doubtful), but it always puts the line "where's your shame, you've left us up to our necks in it" from Changes into my head. (I tend to do this song relation thing a lot with much less tangentially related songs, so this is actually a pretty straightforward connection for me.) Anyhow, it's mid spring, time to sing Changes over and over and over in my head all day. Yay? I mean, it's a great song, but it gets old after a few hours. TRY IT.

Basically it's springtime, the only pretty ring time, when birds do sing...David Bowie tunes, and we bury the stems up to their necks. Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes, people.