Most of us gardeners here in the northeast got punked by the unnaturally warm weather in March. Part of me knew we'd probably pay for the heat with a long stretch of grey wet chill (and we did), but the optimistic me went ahead as though the planting season had begun. I started some peas indoors, scattered spinach seed across a bed, and expected to get salad greens and root vegetables seeded in short order. Almost two months later, I've only just gotten lettuce and arugula started – no carrots, beets, or parsnips yet.
My onion seedlings came in the mail last week, and I managed to get them planted in between rain showers.
The peas I started got rangey and even started to flower (!), but I waited out a couple of good hard frosts before I kicked them out of the house. They're planted outside now, but I need to put up some supports for them to climb (and I need to fill in the rest of that bed with rows of pea seed).
My tomato plants are about to outgrow their accommodations – nearly a foot and a half tall already – but with cool weather threatening to stick around, I don't dare plant them out naked. I've got supplies to put up a few small hoop houses to protect them and the peppers and basil until the sun makes up its mind.
The spinach took nearly 3 weeks to germinate and refused to grow; it's still tiny, but looks beautiful and healthy – no bugs, and all the manure we shoveled in last fall seems to be doing the trick. I'm looking forward to our first spinach salad...
The garlic is almost a foot tall, with stalks as fat as my middle finger. Its leaves are a nice blue-green, which tells me it's getting plenty of nitrogen.
The rhubarb is lush and starting to send up flower stalks. If we get a few hot sunny days, I'll make some sun-cooked rhubarb jam. If not, I'll have to settle for rhubarb margaritas (what a lovely idea to garnish them with violets!).
My garden is comprised of a long single row of raised beds, spread along a narrow apron of yard on the south face of the house. I have a total of twelve 8-foot x 4-foot beds, plus three 8-foot x 2-foot beds placed perpendicularly along one edge. The ground drops away steeply just beyond, so the only opportunity for expansion is to add more beds at either end (or start cultivating other zones of the property). It's virtually impossible to photograph in any meaningful way, but this stitched-together shot, taken with a very wide-angle lens borrowed from a friend, starts to give a feel for it.
One of the ongoing garden chores is digging the weeds out from in between the beds. They don't really threaten the plants in the beds, but if I let them go, they're apt to take over, especially if they were to go to seed. Twice or so a season, I work my way from one end to the other with a digging fork, deeply loosening the soil and lifting out the 'unwanteds'.
Wild strawberries have taken over the bank about halfway along, and in the last two years they've started to fill in between the beds and around the rhubarb (which is nestled in an open spot between two beds). I've noticed that the strawberries have choked out most other weeds, and their runners form a kind of matted mulch as they die off (and look almost like a mat of pine needles). They're such a pretty little plant, low growing and surprisingly rugged underfoot (to say nothing of their delicious fruit – if I can wrest it from the birds and bugs). I've decided to encourage the plants to overtake the interstices of the garden, sort of a living mulch. To that end, I've started plucking the little plants from the hillside and tucking them here and there throughout the garden. In the right half of the photograph below you can see how lovely they are when allowed to take over.
I think it's supposed to be sunny and warm tommorrow; I hope to get a lot of things planted in the beds and start seeds for cucumbers, Delicata squash, and sunflowers (in pots so that I can shelter them indoors from any chill; they should be ready to go in the ground by about the first week in June). And I want to put up one hoop house and rig it with a high/low thermometer to see if I can trust it to keep the tomatoes, etc., warm enough.
I was trying to decide whether to use two or three beds for tomatoes; for the first time ever I drew up a little plan instead of just haphazardly planting until the beds were full. I've decided to stick with two, so I have space for all the other goodies I want to grow.
Last year, we tried growing potatoes in Grow Bags, with disappointing results. This year, we're extending the garden with a cultivated patch for growing potatoes in-ground. We've got a thick tarp laid over the grass, and in the next couple of weeks we'll peel the tarp back and starting prepping. I have a monster Husqvarna tiller that hasn't seen any use since I moved up the road here and started growing exclusively in raised beds. We'll press it into service (and hope the soil isn't too rocky), and then we'll get a load of some kind of animal doo for nutrition.
I also have kind of a loopy bed where I grow annual flowers for cutting (and ogling). I usually plant that towards the middle of June (after a car-filling trip to Walker Farm).
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