A Cool Sunny Day Is Good For Digging
Today we dug and weeded. Our neighbors — at the garden as well as at home — are sharing their plot with us in return for clearing, so for the last couple weeks Chris has been digging out blocks of turf and turning them over in preparation for later sorting. Today, we sorted, pulling lots of grass and grass roots out of the dirt. It was excellent exercise and got me so jazzed that I spent another half hour or so digging weeds out of the herb garden too.
In our main plot, there has been lots of tiny action. The carrots are up, in rows between the radishes, and over in the lettuce bed, I’m starting to see sprouts. I’m guessing they’ve been in there about two weeks so I was starting to wonder. Much more action in the spicy mesclun bed which is mostly mustard varieties, notoriously fast. And that’s about it for seedlings. We’re starting to think about the next round which is arugula, kale and more lettuce, sometime in the next two weeks.
Also, I have solved the mystery of the sorrel. As you may remember, I was surprised to find much further along sorrel growing next door to my cultivated sorrel patch. It was clearly sorrel to look and taste but it was too big to be my seedlings. I pondered and could come to no good conclusion until I happened to be walking by an abandoned plot just yesterday where I noticed more of the same sorrel. When I got home, I looked it up in my favorite reference book Weeds Of The Northeast and found that it is in fact, sheep sorrel, a very close relative of cultivated sorrel and one of the ingredients in the Ojibwe anti-cancer remedy Essiac. I was impressed and transplanted a clump to my own herb corner so I can keep an eye on it.
No pictures this time. Everything is too tiny to be interesting at this point, and we were busy weeding anyway.
