spring retrospective -- part 1

Well, school is finally over and the grades are in. Unfortunately, spring is just about over, too. We did get a fair amount of spring gardening done, but not enough for my liking! A little bit more every year...I hope.

It seems that we spent more time this spring building cages to protect the gardens than we did actually putting in the gardens themselves. Hopefully this is work that won't have to be repeated each year. This is the biggest cage, built by James out of PVC and heavy plastic netting. It's where we planted the peas -- has to be tall to let the peas climb and also covered to keep out the birds. Pole beans will go here when the peas are done.

We planted about 250 peas in here -- 125 sugar snap and 125 garden peas. We harvested about 2.5 pounds of each so far. Not really enough for freezing -- they're so good raw, so who cares -- but it's a start.

The square foot garden had a lot of cole veggies during the spring. We got one tiny broccoli (head was the size of a ping-pong ball). It looked beautiful one day, but so tiny, so I decided to leave it. Then, when we went back a few days later, it had started to turn yellow. So hard to garden when you're not there every day! Plus, we left it in the car when we got home, so no one got to try it. The chickens liked the two green caterpillars on it, though.

The pak chois were the prettiest, imo. Can't wait for fall so I can grow more. They looked so beautiful one weekend but had bolted by the next. Now I know how big they'll get (not very big) and will harvest them sooner. And plant more of them. We needed three plants to make enough for one dinner. (One from my garden, one from Julia's, and one from Xing Hua's.)

Still in the gardens are collards (supposedly heat tolerant, thus their popularity in the South) and kale. Hope the kale doesn't bolt on us.

The onions are doing well. We pulled one a week or so ago to see how they were growing. The bulb was about the size of the broccoli. Bigger than a scallion, but not quite an onion bulb.


I think I got the lettuce and spinach in a bit too late. All the spinach bolted with just 4 leaves on the stalk. Lettuce is iffy. We did get one butterhead. Very spotty, though, and not good eating. And a bunch of radishes. But who likes radishes if there's no lettuce?

My friend, Lisa, gave me gobs of lettuce from her garden. She did it right -- plant early and often! I ate salad for lunch every day for a week. Salad with her lettuce, my radishes and garden peas. And some left-over roast chicken (from Julia's 4H bird, of course.) Now that's living!

so much to do

I am realizing the biggest problem with writing a gardening blog. In the winter, there was never anything interesting in the garden to write about. Now that it's spring, there is so much to write about but so little time to write!

I have started lots of seedlings, which are growing under lights in the basement. I have removed last fall's leaves from my gardens and noticed new growth. (Oregano! Chives! Peppermint! Sage! Julia even picked a bunch of second-year parsley already!) But it's too early to plant much outside besides peas, greens, and cole crops.

We have done a lot this past week, though. The weather has been gorgeous -- sunny and 70s all week. I'll have to catch up a little at a time, as I can't write everything now. (Back to school. Ugh.)

Ever since I'd discovered the book Square Foot Gardening (in our Lansdowne-gardening days), I've always wanted to try actual square-foot gardening. So this year, Dana bought me the newest edition, and I am going to try a few SFGs with my smaller crops. (Meaning, those I'm not planting lots and lots of plants.) So, on the last Saturday in March, Dana and I went out to the farmhouse and built a 4' x 8' SFG raised bed. I planted 4 squares of onion sets (they were starting to sprout already), 4 squares of lettuce (various types), 2 of spinach, 1 of turnips, and 1 of carrots.

On April 3, we spent the whole day working in the farmhouse garden. James built some (hopefully) squirrel- and rabbit-proof cages out of PVC and chicken wire, so I was able to cover my SFG. (Someone had already dug up some of my onions!) I planted 8 squares of cole seedlings (2 broccoli, 2 kale, 2 collards, 2 bok choi -- one seedling in each square) and 1 square of onion seedlings (hoping to get scallions!). Hoping the new cage works.

I also planted 246 MORE pea seeds (same kind as last month). And James built a HUGE cage for that plot. (No SFG here!) We didn't have time to finish it, but hopefully we can get back to do that before the seeds come up and the animals eat the seedlings.

Okay...back to grading papers. Tomorrow I'll tell you about the flowers and the fruit trees, and maybe even the baby bunnies in Xing Hua's garden. Sigh.