90% of garden is in. Now I'm adding hard to find plants-for me, poblano peppers, San Marzano tomatoes-planted them between rain showers. Yet to find eggplant-not looking hard as I'm unsure on them-or Marconi peppers. Marconi peppers I think I'll strike out on as only person who had them thinks they are gold-not to me.
I am going slow for some reason. Rainy and wet, but I need to weed. I am also doing the onions in stages. I just hate to plant onions. Can you plant some in little clumps instead of one at a time? What would happen?
Winter Peas, @Hal ? My spring peas (& broadbeans) burned up in record heat, last June.
@Gardening with Rabbits , I do that "little clump" planting with leaf lettuce. Prefer to harvest all together by pulling but can leave a small plant by cutting. I can only imagine that onions would entangle roots like crazy but don't know.
Remember this transplanting mantra: Many roots; Some leaves; One stem.
Onions are monocots like corn and, their lily cousins so the "stem" isn't so obvious as with dicots. Many roots, some leaves, one stem.
You can damage a leaf. Break the stem with my clumsy digitS' and I have killed the plant. With tiny dicot seedlings, I try not to even touch the stem.
Onion roots are many! You can cut them off with scissors. It shouldn't set them back much.
I hold the seedling between the index and middle finger, not between the index finger and the thumb.
The soil is as soft as I can get it. I scratch the seedling in. Yes, just hold the seedling loosely and scratch with those two digitS', leaving the seedling behind in the soil. Wear latex or nitrile gloves. Heavier gloves will hold up better but you will lose some sensitivity.
They don't really go in rows. Scratch, scratch, scratch ... Onion, onion, onion ....
As Steve suggested, you can plant the tiniest of onion starts in small clumps, then as they get larger you can divide the clumps, cut the roots to about 1 to 1 1/2 inches and replant farther apart. You will lose some growing time as they adjust and re-grow their root system, but with a long growing season you can still get a good harvest.
I recently dug and divided my chives -- can we talk tangled roots? They are doing just fine with the root cutting and replanting.
@digitS' I can only grow peas here during the cooler months when temperatures are low enough that powdery mildew is not active. I'm about to germinate some tomato seed, it is perceived as too cold here to grow tomatoes in winter but it is also the best time in my opinion as all the pests and diseases that cause issue here are not active or present at all. I'm looking at growing out some for clean seed in containers so it should be easy enough.
Peas here do best during the cooler spring weather as well. We have one pea that is supposed to take higher temps -- "WANDA" -- but I've found even she does better in the cool.
Poured ALL DAY!!! I weeded and fed them to my chickens. They may not eat them all, but it will add to the run cleanup/compost later on. I might be able to make a little bit more progress at DD's back yard tonight. I will start my pictures tonight, too.