Another Super-Duper Spring Day

written by Yvonne

Although we both would have rather been sitting on the front porch reading and/or napping, there was much Spring gardening and yard work to do. Luckily the weather was beyond beautiful which made it much easier to haul our butts outside to get some work done; high was 54 with not a cloud in the sky.

Tom has been out of town for a while so this was his first opportunity to get back to the strawberries. There were 12 plants left over from the first planting so he bought some dirt, filled up several pots, and planted the remaining strawberries.

The first round of plants have already started to flower.

According to Master Gardener Jerry Baker, we are to pinch off all the berries that form between now and mid-summer. This will ensure a Fall crop this year and two harvests each year thereafter.  It's hard to see but in the dead center of this photo you can see a berry starting. Off with it's head!

Spring = greens, greens, and more greens which makes TY happy, happy and more happy!  I harvested four bags of kale and four bags of collards. These were from plants that were overwintered, proving that it does pay to plant things in late Fall/early Winter for an early Spring harvest. We had already planted more kale and collards several weeks ago so hopefully we'll get one more round of greens before the heat of the summer hits.

What does one do with so many greens?

• Friday night was kale pesto pasta.
• Saturday morning we added kale to our breakfast green smoothie.
• Saturday night it was sauteed collards with grit cakes, tomatoes and eggs.
• Tonight there's a BIG kale salad waiting for us with some fish on the side.
• Tomorrow night we'll have sauteed collards with more fish.
• Tuesday night Tom will make grits and greens.
• And any greens left over after all this will make its way into our breakfast smoothies the rest of the week. (I know you wish you were here, Rebecca.)

What?! Another batch of greens? Yes, but this is lettuce and spinach. This was also overwintered. Lunch for the week!

There was a freeze warning last night (temps dropped into the 20s) which is exactly why we left the hoops up on the bed with growing greens.  Tom covered them up for the night and everything survived just fine.

While Tom was busy breaking our lawn mower, I got busy planting the rest of the Spring seeds which included:

• snow peas
• snap peas
• cress
• spinach
• onions (2 varieties)
• beets
• carrots (2 varieties)
• cabbage (round 2)

All four beds are now fully planted for the Spring. Next up, we'll start summer veg in pots and keep them in the greenhouse until the weather gets nice and hot.

Seeds Started!

written by Yvonne

(This was from two weeks ago)

We have a big house re-decorating project in our very near future so we had to get some seeds going if we were to get a jump on Spring.  Tom laid out some left over roofing tiles to block the grass from growing into the green house.

The previous greenhouse cover was torn in several places and one of the zippers broke so we bought a new one.

It was a beautiful day so Tom set up a make-shift workbench outside.

He filled up the pots with dirt and started planting seeds. He got carried away and ended up planting two different types of seeds in each of the pots in Tray 4.

Who knows, maybe we'll get a parsley-cabbage hybrid of some kind. It will be interesting to see what comes up in these pots since each one has two different seeds.

One bag of dirt was chock full of ants so he dumped it into the herb bed.

All seeds got planted and set in the greenhouse.  We started cabbage, 4 different kinds of peppers, parsley, broccoli, onions. We were also supposed to get lettuce, peas, collards, kale, Swiss chard and spinach planted directly in the beds but that didn't happen. It'll have to wait a few weeks before we can get to it.

Honey and Olive enjoyed their day outside.

End of Winter, into Spring. Work, work, work!

written by Yvonne

This post is an accumulation of about three weeks worth of gardening work. Instead of writing about it by the week, it's categorized by areas of the garden.

GARLIC

The grass had grown SUPER high around the garlic and it was gonna take some time to dig through and determine what of the tall green stuff was grass and what was garlic.

Describing this as similar to finding a needle in a haystack may be a slight exaggeration, but not by much.  The garlic looked ever so slightly different from the grass. The grass was so intermixed, it wasn't possible to pull the grass out without disturbing the garlic, so I oped to just cut the grass as close to the soil as possible.

These two piles of grass is what I cut from around the garlic.

Last step was to put hay around each bulb of garlic. Whew! What a job. If Ruth Stout's hay mulching works, I'll never have to do that again.

POTATOES AND ONIONS

This area is where we've grown potatoes before. Last season, we planted both onions and potatoes but the onions never took off. Or so we thought....

Upon closer inspection, there are onions growing here (kinda hard to see in this picture, but they're there). We started a round of onions in pots this year and Tom added them to this patch as well.

I threw the potatoes on one end of the potato/onion bed and then covered them with a thick layer of hay. We'll see if they spout this way or now.  It'll be SO cool if they do!  (I have doubts.)

PEAS

Granted, it has been cold, but gosh darn it these peas are taking their sweet time.  This big white ball in the photo is the pea seed pushing out of the ground ready to open up.

Here is one that has shed its outer hull and started to actually sprout.

NEW PLANTINGS (IN POTS)

Time for even more seeds to go into the greenhouse.

All the herbs, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and round two of broccoli, kale, and more greens are all in pots now.

The first round of collards, kale, onions and broccoli are doing pretty good at this point.

PARSLEY

I'd uncovered a parsley plant no too long ago.  It sure is great to have such flavorful parsley at the ready when cooking! I spread another row's worth of seeds next to it so there would be plenty through the spring and summer.

COLLARDS

After putting the hay down just a few weeks ago, the collards, spinach and cabbage grew significantly and they all turned greener. I couldn't believe how much of an impact the hay has made in such a short time! Since the second round of collards had sprouted in pots and was read to plant, I thought the best thing to do would be to...

pull all the collards out and make space for the new seedlings. So I did just that. Once the plants were pulled up...

I pushed the hay to one side...

and carefully separated the seedlings from one another and planted them in the space where the previous collards had been.

And now it looks like this.

And here's how much I pulled up. Three baskets full!

Tom and I made an assembly line to blanch the greens and set them in 10oz nests for freezing. We were able to get 5 10oz nests out of the three baskets full.

BERRIES

We blinked and all of a sudden the berries started blooming. These are canes that didn't produce berries last year and supposedly they will produce berries this year.

We didn't get all of the canes cut back and now (obviously) it's too late cut them. So we may just wake up one morning to find our cars completely surround by fast-growing raspberry and blackberry canes.

DIRECT SOWING

Several items do better by sowing them directly (versus starting them in pots) so Tom got to work doing some direct sowing. First thing he had to do was clear the hay completely off the planting area. When planting seeds direct, you have to get them at least to touch the dirt.

Once the hay was removed, he sprinkled seeds in the dirt and patted them down.

Here is a nice half-bed worth of lettuces...

and another quarter of a bed of spinach, carrots and beets.

Once the seeds sprout, we'll pull the hay around the plants, like we did for the spinach and collards.

There's lots of activity going on with T's Bees these days. If you want to read all the buzz, go to www.tsbeeshoney.com.  Also, if you want to know when the 2013 crop of honey is ready for purchase, click on the Contact Ts Bees page and fill out the form.

End-of-Spring Push

written by Yvonne

The weather is still nice so this week and weekend will be our big end-of-Spring push to get everything in the ground before the weather becomes too hot.

Last weekend Tom took care of the potatoes. He started by tilling up the potato patch. There were signs of onions growing, but when he pulled them up, there were hardly any bulbs to them.  We're finding that this patch is really only good for potatoes, so that's what we'll stick to for this mostly-shady spot.

During the tilling process, he found a few potatoes left over from last fall.

He created rows and dropped the potatoes in.

He covered the whole area with straw that he'd used as a wind block for the bees over the winter.

"I see wabbits!" Our neighbor bought his daughters a bunny for Easter.  They keep it in a cage between our house and theirs. Olive is a border terrier; bread to hunt small, animals.. ya know, like bunnies. She keeps a close eye on the wabbit every time we're outside.  (Next time I'll get a picture with the wabbit in it.)

The raspberries are coming in a hand-full or so at a time.

Raspberry-licious!

This is probably a two cups or so. Hee hee!

Blackberries taking their time ripening. Trying to be patient but COME ON BERRIES; HURRY UP AND RIPEN! I got jam, cobblers, and crisps to make!

Blueberries moving from green to green-blue.

I started flower seeds a month or so ago. The two on the outsides are sunflowers, the one in the middle (which you really can't see) are wildflowers.

Because it appeared that the cold snap killed the basil, I started some more in pots.  I was going to restrain from over doing the basil this year but I think I'm going to end up with an abundance once again.  It's hard to see but right in the middle of this photos are a bunch of very small seeds that sprouted.  I went ahead and planted them all.

And as luck would have it, the basil (front) that I thought had been killed off is doing FANTASTIC.  The oregano (back) was a cutting from a student of mine, and it's doing well too.

Yesterday I did a LOT of weeding - something we haven't kept up with very well this Spring.  After weeding all of bed #1 and parts of the other three, I set to getting all the seedling planted.

Longtime followers of TYs VeggiePatch will no doubt recognize this flower because we've taken a similar picture every year. Squash blossoms have arrived.

This is the other squash plant. Both of these are the crookneck variety we've grown every year. The other two squash plants (not shown) are a new variety and not nearly as far along as these.

This is bed #2 where the buttercruch lettuce and radishes were. We'd eaten all the radishes, except for one that went to seed. I harvested all the buttercrunch that was left because it was showing signs of bolting. After pulling them out (along with about 10 pounds of weeds), I put up stakes, and planted the bean seedlings.  These are the borlotto beans...

and these are the burgundy beans.

It's nice to look at your garden when it isn't overrun with weeds, don't you think?  In addition to planting the beans, I trimmed back the dill and cilantro, planted additional cilantro seedlings, and pulled out the unsuccessful broccoli and cauliflower. (Shhh... don't tell Tom. He has a hard time pulling up plants that are still alive, but these hadn't produced any broccoli or cauliflower and they certainly won't as it gets hotter). The mesculin (sp?) lettuce didn't look close to bolting so I kept it in.

In place of the broccoli and cauliflower I planted the golden and banana peppers.

I didn't end up picking the scapes off the tops of the garlic. I did notice they were getting bigger and kind of bumpy so I went in for a closer look....

Seems as though when the scapes grow, they produce the seed pods and will soon turn into a puffy flower. Looking forward to seeing what this looks like when it opens up all the way. Stay tuned.

After several days of good rain, I knew there'd be lots of peas ready to harvest. And boy was I right. Just pulling off the largest ones gave me about four cups worth.

Look at how huge this one is!

This is one area I didn't weed yet so it's hard to distinguish what's what. But what you're mainly looking at is the cowpeas that struggled to come up. Once they did come up, it looked like they got killed by the cold. Then they came back. They are officially doing well. Now... if I can just remove enough of the weeds to really see what I've got.

Again with the plethora of weeds... but the pant in the foreground is okra. This must be a dwarf variety because the plant is very small but...

it already has okra forming! I'll be happy if this thing doesn't become a 10' tall tree like the ones in past years.

The amount of rain we got caused everything to quadruple in size. This kale had a few leaves at best the last time I looked. Now, it's over taking the beets!

The parsley is basically a hedge at this point. Around the kale, beets and parsley, I did some trimming, harvesting and weeding and...

this is the result. I harvested a lot of the kale (now shown to the left of the beets) and made kale chips (YUM!).  Didn't do anything with the beets at the moment but this weekend I'll harvest several and roast them up for Roasted Beet and Goat Cheese Salad.  I also trimmed the parsley "hedge" on all four sides as well as the top.  Now it no longer hangs over the bed.  This allowed room for a few more tomoato plants. These tomato plants will likely get way too big to be here, but by that time the beets and kale will be gone so we'll encourage it to grow towards where the beets currently are.

I couldn't seem to get rosemary started from seed so I asked around for anyone who might be able to spare a clipping from an established plant. I put this cutting in the bed where we can't seem to get anything (but more weeds) to grow. We'll check back in a week or so to see if it's taken root.

Fig tree still doing well. Hopefully it will make it out of the pot and into the ground sometime this year.

Whew!  I worked hard to get as many of the seedlings planted as possible and seeing how little is left in the mini-greenhouse, I'd say I did a good job. What's left are onions, chives, and a mystery plant.

A reward for a hard day's work in the garden. A glass of champagne and a bowl of raspberries, bananas and a dollop of vanilla yogurt.

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