In April we bought some Pak Choi seedlings from the Brooklyn Market. I tried to plant some seeds in growing pods but they came out very tall and thin. They had a hard time standing up. I planted 7 trays and even the ones that I had placed under the light did not look as good as these ones from the market
Pak Choi can withstand colder temperatures which means you can plant it outside much earlier than other plants. Most of the other plants will go in the ground end of May. To take advantage of multiple harvests we planted it in our covered raised beds as soon as possible. Spending some money on seedlings was not a big deal. We ended up getting a variety called Joi Choi.
We ended up planting over 120 plants in 2 separate beds. We decided to do 4 rows of plants. One of the beds we used last year for tomatoes, while the other is newly made. We filled it with compost we bough in bulk from https://www.grilloservices.com/. We had the soil delivered and we used a barrel to move the soil from the driveway into the bed. Each bed is 32feet x 4 feet.
The plants grew very well however we noticed that leaving the top clear plastic cover partially open interfered with the rate of growth. We needed to fully remove the cover each day to allow full sun. We also had a problem with slugs which I will write another post about. The slugs were eating up the leaves leaving small holes. We had to inspect each plant nightly and pick off any slugs we found. We sporadically feed the plants using Miracle Gro Liquid Fertilizer. We used a 2Gallon spray bottle to distribute the feed to each plant.
At the end of the harvest we sold about 75 plant and we used the rest. We will try to plant some more seedlings in a couple of weeks.
