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?

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?

Spring, or should I say, summer?

One of the nice things (perhaps the only nice thing) about the storms of the winter is that we now have "partial sun" in our vegetable garden, which is a huge improvement over the "partial shade" that I believe that we had last year.
I only know this because we bought a Sun Calc light meter that tells us this. And the garden is looking great. This is an early picture-note the fencing at the very top.
This is a new addition to keep woodchucks out of the garden. Bill Alexander in this excerpt from The $64 Tomato tells the story of the woodchuck in his garden who waited for the pulsing on the electric fence to stop and slipped through the two electric wires. Bill Alexander called him "Super Chuck."
Made me glad I didn't bother with the electric fence this year. Anne wasn't too keen on it since it only takes one time for the batteries to go, or for the grounding to come undone, and the woodchuck has salad.
Everything is very lush-look at this, taken over the Memorial Day weekend-those are the snap peas on the pea fence from Gardener's Supply (our favorite place for garden stuff). And the raised beds are last year's model from Square Foot Gardening. My nephew Michael got this year's model-tool-less! When these fall apart, and they will, I'm going for the "tool-less" kind. We used Mel Bartholomew's book, Square Foot Gardening, New Edition as a guide. I especially like the revised "Mel's Mix."
Let me tell you about the strawberries-Anne harvested this pint on Saturday. They are amazingly sweet, and amazingly soft-if you make a fist with them in your hand you'll have squished berries.
So far, so good. Let's hope it stays this way!

Constructing the Raised Beds

The packages arrived today from Square Foot Gardening--wooden pieces to construct 7 raised beds. It was a warm sunny day and AFTER going to the farmer's market, working out at the gym, and going to the library, we came home to find that FedEx had delivered the beds. Spent all afternoon in the hot sun working on them. Of course the 12 foot one had to be taken apart and done twice, since there were no instructions and it was not clear how to connect the pieces. I guess the tree work really worked--there was not one bit of shade!