A Gardener's Retreat

We spent an hour or so at the garden this morning, planting herbs in the Herb Garden and looking after our vegetable plot.  The rain last night seems to have come in the nick of time for our chard which was starting to tire of the heat and dryness.  Everything else looks great — a bountiful feast for the eyes as well as the palate.

We harvested a bunch of gigantic radishes, so gigantic that I have been jokingly referring to them as “radish gods,” after the character in the animated film Spirited Away (highly recommended, by the way).  The watermelon radishes did exceptionally well, and have been making large to giant radishes that are mild but firm fleshed and look just like watermelon when you slice them up.  We’ve been enjoying them in salads for weeks now.

"Prize" First Zucchini

Over in the zucchini patch, we have exceptional productivity on the part of our pair of cast-off starts.  We harvested two nice size zucchinis today and have four or five more still on the vine, so to speak.  One plant seems to be producing more than the other, and we’re not sure why.  But we think it will catch up over time.  Meanwhile, in the same general area, our seed-grown cucumbers are at the 6″ high stage and just starting to make flowers.  Can fresh crunchy cucumbers be far behind?

The big excitement is the tomato plants which are tantalizingly covered with hard green tomatoes.  Only the Sun Golds are starting to ripen.  But I was pleased to see that a bunch more tomatoes have formed and it looks like the Jet Star (highly rated by Walker Farm) is starting to come into its own.  Surprisingly, both the Black Krim and exotic Blue tomatoes are putting out lots of fruit too.  I had expected them to be a little less prolific.

Meanwhile, the Rainbow Chard is still making leaves but is suffering a bit of crowding from a flock of over-exuberant borage plants.  Borage is a giant of a plant, with fat, fleshy stems and large hairy leaves.  The flowers look like blue/magenta falling stars and are formed in profusion from large umbelliferous flower heads.  We grew ours from seed and based on how happy they are, I would say that’s the way to go.

Otherwise, the garden didn’t need much tending today.  We trimmed off some dead leaves, planted a few more carrots (why not?), and weeded, as always.  One of the plants we are NOT weeding out is the mullein, which happily seeded in all over our plot this season.  I love mullein for the wonderful cold and cough remedy it provides; this year, I’ll have plenty of organically grown leaves to dry in advance of the winter flu season.

For us, the highlight of the season is Tomato Planting Day.  Once last frost is over with, we get antsy.  So we took advantage of good weather this weekend to buy all our starts and set them out in the plot there.  It was great fun.

We bought all our plants at Walker Farm and only splurged a little.  We got a six pack each of basil,  mixed hot peppers (jalapeno, paprika, ancho, habanero, and our personal favorites, cherry bomb) and marigolds.  As for tomatoes, it’s hard to remember what we got exactly but I know Purple Calabash was one, as well as Old Brooks, a marbled yellow and pink number, and another pink eating tomato.  For cherry tomatoes, we got Sweet 100 because that’s what they had.

Once out at the plot, we had a lot of work to do watering, prepping, weeding, manuring and all the rest.  It was another marathon (by our standards) of around 3 hours.  When we were done, we had all the summer vegetables in the ground.  

As for everything else, our results remain mixed.  Going around the seed beds, the beans are up! the mesclun is starting to shoot to flower, there are three more kale seedlings than there were before (after reseeding), the second crop of radishes are up and it looks like some of the reseeded carrots are too, the eating cucumbers are up but the pickling cukes are not, the pattypan squashes are just getting started, and the lettuces remain pathetic.

If we’ve had one big crop so far this year, it’s radishes, which we always hope will be the case.  This year, as some readers may remember, I planted half brand new seed (Easter Egg Mix) and half mixed bag old seed.  I got great results from the new seed and very small radishes if any out of the old seed.  But yesterday was the big bonanza — I brought home at least 25 radishes, some quite large and globular.  We ate a bunch in salad last night and they were positively juicy, as well as spicy and sweet.  I’m not sure if there are any health bennies to radishes but I felt healthy eating them.

Now we’re just sitting back and hoping for rain.  If the current forecast is any indication, we’re bound to get lucky one of the next three days…

So Memorial Day is come and gone and so is the last frost date.  But wouldn’t you know, they’re forecasting widespread frost tonight.  That didn’t stop us from planting a whole lot more seeds but it did prevent us from putting in tomato and basil.  We’ve decided to wait until the next astrologically auspicious planting days — June 5 and 6 — to put in the warm season starts like tomatoes and peppers.

That said, we put in a bit of a marathon this weekend with two or three hours each weekend day.  On Saturday, Chris cleared weeds and scythed grass while I prepped and seeded.  I put in cucumbers where the peas didn’t happen, and pattypan squashes in the long bed, nearby the other Sugar Ann snap peas which are the only ones that came up.  We figure by the time the squash are in need of space, the snap peas will be done.  We can just cut the tops to the ground, leave the roots in as fertilizer and let the pattypan take over.

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First Radish

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?

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!

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.