A Gardener's Retreat

 

It’s radish time!  we are officially harvesting food from our garden.  The radishes have done pretty well this year — especially the Easter Egg mix which we get every year. There’s something nice about having radishes of many colors and with this mix, they’re good sized as well (half inch radishes hardly seem worth it….)

The other early crop is the spicy mesclun mix which is now at the “harvest every day” stage.  There are about six varieties of spicy greens and boy are they delicious.  That said, our lettuce seeds barely sprouted and we’re going to have to plant them all again.  Same for the sorrel which did nothing — fortunately, the wild sorrel grew in right next to it so we weren’t deprived.

Everything else is muddling along.  The peas are not as big as I’d hoped but I think we’ll get some eventually.  About half the carrots came up and another bunch didn’t.  This is my fault for planting old seeds.  It looks like we’re going to have to replant there too but I’m ok with that.  

And now that Memorial Day is out of the way, it’s suddenly time to plant everything else.  It’s going to be busy for the next few weeks as we put in tomatoes, hot peppers, corn, cucumbers, pattypan squashes, basil and of course, green beans.  The sooner they’re in the ground, the sooner we can start to eat them and that’s what it’s all about, right?

We went over to the Community Garden today to take advantage of the weather and plant some seeds and starts. I had on my calendar to plant cabbage, kale and arugula around this time, and since there’s rain in the forecast, it seemed perfect.

We got our starts out at Walkers over the weekend – 6 cabbages, 6 parsley and a thyme plant.  I also had a bunch of kale seeds left over from last year, a Russian Red as I recall, and some more of that wild arugula.  

Once out at the garden, we realized that there was a lot to access.  Although at first glance, most plants seemed small, there was more action than we expected.  We have a full bed of peas, with seedlings around 4 inches high on average.  The lettuces, which seemed non-existent, are just small. I planted more red romaine to supplement.

On the more robust side, the spicy mesclun are doing great (planted more of them too) and the radishes getting appreciably bigger.  In between, there’s a nice carrot crop coming up, a lot more than I expected.  We’ll still have to replant a few patches but overall it’s looking good. 

Chris did a lot of work on the B&J plot north of us and it’s all over but the sifting for grass roots.  The turf is out.  This is great timing because we want to plant it in two weeks.  I guess we’ll be out there this weekend, weeding and prepping.

A final word on our herb bed which has been going for several years.  Although the echinacea are not as vigorous as I’d like, the chives are huge, and it looks like the lavender and sage are growing in really well after having been cut back almost to the ground last fall.  The thyme plant, which is small but tall, will keep them company.  Meanwhile, the chamomile Nancy gave us is starting to look comfortable — I hope it does well.  It makes the sweetest tea.

Here in early May, we’re in a bit of a gardening lull.  We planted lots of seeds a few weeks ago, and now we’re just watching our seedlings grow and waiting  for it to be warm enough to plant the next set of crops.  Meanwhile, the weather has been cooperative and our garden has gotten enough rain to keep  it happy.    

Some things are doing better than others of course.  Our radishes are all up and there are lots of them.  They now have second leaves. 

The peas were a mixed bag (not literally but figuratively).  Some of our Sugar Ann Snap Peas came up and others did not.  In fact, only the ones planted in earliest April came up as they should have.  The others gave us less than 50% germination.  My theory is that the soil got too warm too fast.

Additionally, we planted lettuce a while back and so far, it has done very little.  Too early?  Not true of the spicy mesclun greens which seem to have all sprouted and are almost ready to sample.  The mustards seem also to like it plenty cool.

Of the many sorrel seeds I planted, it appears that only one came up.  That said, I have plenty of wild sorrel if I want it.  But I was kind of hoping for the fancy French kind.  I guess more research is required.

Interestingly, the volunteer arugula is looking much better this year than it did last.  Much larger leafier rosette have come up apparently from the seeds of last year’s plants.  Very spicy and delicious — I’ll have to harvest it soon.

We’re ready to go on our mid May planting and just waiting for the latest cold snap to pass.  Over the weekend, we manured the bed where we plan to put cabbages and kale.  Later this week, we’ll plant it.  We bought our red cabbage starts from Walker’s and will plant kale from seed.  We’ll also put in more arugula to keep the other ones company (the seed package says mid Spring) and replant our sorry lettuces.  It’s not summer without buttercrunch!

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.

We stopped by the garden today to see how the workday was going and to check on our sprouts.  Not surprisingly, there were more than last time.  The first of the peas we planted — all of them snap peas — have finally come up.  They’re barely above ground but on their way.  

The spicy asian greens we planted have come up as well, but none of the lettuce.  What has me scratching my head is the sorrel.  The sorrel we planted is just starting to come up — tiny seedlings right where we planted them.  But a few feet away, uphill from the patch I planted, is a fully formed clump of — you guessed it, sorrel.  I did not plant sorrel there (in the middle of a dead kale plant).  And it’s much bigger than the sorrel I did plant.  Moreover, I have never planted sorrel before.  But I tasted it and it’s sorrel all right.  Now where did it come from?  

For the curious, here it is:

 

We have lift off in the radish and carrot bed.  Radishes have sprouted right down the line, including those planted from last year’s seeds.  We moved the straw away to give them more air and light but they look good.

Here’s a picture of our first sprout.  I think we’ll call him Elmer.

We’re planting early this year.  Anything that doesn’t make it, we can replant.  Today was warm with relatively light breezes so we headed out to the garden to plant some seeds.  

Chris had come into some chicken wire so he made us a fence for our peas.  We planted Sugar Ann and Sugar Daddy snap peas and another variety of regular peas.  Actually, the Sugar Ann went in Saturday.  So, based on the seed packet’s instructions, we should have pea seedlings by the 28th of this month.  I’m paying attention because some of the seeds we planted are a year old or more so if they don’t come up I want to replant fast.

I also planted interspersed rows of carrots and radishes, more than ever before but we’ve always had good luck with them and there never seem to be enough.  I still have two rows of carrots to plant but so far we have Easter Egg and Petit Dejeuner radishes and Royal Chantenay and Scarlet Nantes carrots in the ground.

The other exciting planting was sorrel which I’ve never grown before.   I planted a small bed of it just to see what would happen.  Hopefully, I’ll get enough for the French classic Sorrel Soup, which I’ve wanted to make for years.

After all our seeds were planted, we trudged down to the stream down the hill and filled some buckets to water.  It’s dry for the first inch or so but nice and moist below.  Hopefully we can keep everything watered until Sunday when (cross your fingers) we get rain.  I’m looking forward to that straw shipment too, so we can start to mulch.

Next on the planting list is lettuce which we’re going to schedule around the weather forecast.  I’d like it to be a bit wetter before we try to get that going.  In the meantime, with luck we should have radish seedlings within the week!  That’s always exciting.

Because my calendar said that this weekend was good for planting — and because the weather, time, and timing were also right — we went over to the garden to work on our plot.  There wasn’t too much to do.  We turned over the dirt and pulled out a bunch of grass roots that were snaking their way through the soil.  Luckily they were really easy to pull out after the rain.

Good news!  We have worms, big fat juicy worms.  This is our third year in this plot and every year we do what we can to amend the soil  Last year it was leaf mould.  Apparently our efforts are starting to pay off.  I’m going to bring more leaf compost tomorrow — that’s about the only compost our backyard will produce.

In the “what’s growing now” category, we are pleased that despite the munchings of whatever allium-loving critter, our four clumps of perennial chives are growing big and strong.  The catnip is doing well too, and I transplanted one to the common perennial garden so eventually, there will be some for everyone to enjoy (if anyone is looking for catnip in the meantime, ask us).  

It’s never a Spring day at the garden if I don’t plant something, so today I planted snap peas.  I hope to get a few meals out of them this year — I’ve never had much luck with peas of any kind so this year I’m confining my efforts to this one variety and we’ll see how we do.

Tomorrow, we’ll be back to plant lettuce (butter crunch, romaine), radishes, carrots, and sorrel, which I found at Agway today and had to buy because I’ve always wanted to try it.  (The French make a sorrel soup they swear by but where does one find sorrel in America? I now have the answer — you grow it yourself.)

We went out to the garden on March 28 to see how things were coming along.  To our surprise, all the snow was gone.  We found our bare little plot easily.  Good news — the lavender survived.  Not sure about the thyme or the sage though which looked quite dead.  They could still revive so we’ll give them time.  

The other good news was the chives which were up in large clumps that appear to already be food for something as they are nibbled.  I nibbled a piece myself and it was pungently tasty. Fun to be eating something from the garden again.

The cats will be happy too — we have a new clump of catnip coming up in a place I wasn’t expecting.

- Chris and Lise