Late Spring: Lots of lettuce

Our garden is looking great--it always looks great in Spring.

We've done pretty well, all things considered. Here are a few shots:

Those are lettuce and spinach plants in the front of that bed.

We've already had lettuce and spinach from the garden, and there's clearly more than we can harvest.

That's a new raised bed from Gardener's Supply

I grabbed a Sharpie marker and dated the bed so that when it falls apart in, oh ten or twelve years, I'll remember when I put it together.

We put the little "greenhouse" in the garden with the herbs that Anne started indoors from seed. They are ready to be hardened off.

The bed in the bottom left is kale--very delicious kale, I might add.

The bushy looking plant near the greenhouse is a strawberry plant that overwintered beautifully.

And finally, below is a panoramic shot of the garden. It probably won't look this good for very long!

How's your garden coming?

Finally, a day in the garden!

Yesterday we were able to work in the garden. I was so happy to just be out of the house! We removed the row covers that we put on last week when we had a frost warning. The radishes and greens look fine.

Look what was under the row covers--radishes!

We planted all of the herbs that we bought at Hilltop Hanover Farm. After a couple of years of not belonging to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) we belong to two: Hilltop Hanover and Fable We joined these two because they are CSA's that issue you a "card" and you can shop whenever you want and buy whatever you want. We are experimenting with this model--it allowed us to get organic herb starters for the garden that we didn't know we were going to have.

Anne planting herbs

Herbs from Hilltop Hanover Farm

The plan was to travel this summer--Ha!--and not have a garden. "Man plans, God laughs" goes the old Yiddish saying and it apparently applies to women also. Once we realized that we would be around all summer it made sense to plan a garden. We can't get to White Flower Farm for our tomatoes this year and we might just give up on tomatoes anyway. The Old Farmer's Almanac is predicting another wet summer for this region.

We've had so much rain that I don't think I'll need to take advantage of the DripWorks irrigation system that I put in a few years ago.

So how's your "sheltering in place" going?

Gardening in the time of the novel coronavirus

We haven’t posted in, oh, six years, based on the date of the last post ;) And we weren’t going to have much of a garden this year because we had travel plans. Mensch plans, God laughs.

So when it became clear that we weren’t going to be going anywhere we revisited our garden plans. A really bad snowstorm in March of 2018 collapsed the garden fences. Here’s a “before picture” of the collapsed garden. The fences were rebuilt that Spring.

Collapsed garden, March 2018

Garden after being rebuilt, summer 2018

Our microclimate is changing. These past couple of summers have been so wet that the tomatoes basically drowned. We thought long and hard before we picked this years plantings.

We’ve planted radishes and lettuces from seed on April 4th. These plants will do okay even if the weather is cool. You can just see the seedlings coming up in these pictures taken today, April 14. Ten days of a mix of rain (like 2 inches yesterday) and sun seem to be doing these seedlings good.

 

We marked each row with the name of whatever it was we planted (the “we” in that sentence is Anne).

And now we just watch and wait!

How are your gardens coming?

Where has the summer gone?

So here are some pictures of the garden-it's now August and I somehow didn't even post one picture all of June and July, so I'll just post highlights (but not the squash borers or the asparagus beetles-more pleasant highlights).
So here are a few June shots-on the left is the cucumber obelisk (with a Gerber daisy on top-thanks to Betty Torrance, thanks Betty!) before it was overrun with too many cucumbers.
And before bugs got most of them.
The tomatoes are a much happier story, so here's a shot of them from early June (above) with a whole mess of (I think) Johnny Jump Ups in front of them.
One last June shot, the one in the center above-look at how neat everything looks!