Full Garden

With the warm weather having arrived the garden is pretty full. Crops like tomatoes and beans are already beginning to take off. Here are pole beans at the base of their trellises. Some are starting to wind around the trellis and begin their climb up.

Tomatoes have begun to shoot up. I tied them for the first time yesterday, while dodging raindrops. For any indeterminate tomatoes (those that continue to grow seemingly forever) I remove any suckers and tie the plants to stakes, similar to the green stake in this bean photo. For my one determinate tomato I use a wire tomato cage and leave the side shoots.

Everything looks good so far with the exception of spinach. Last year I had a huge crop. By this time I had harvested 13 pounds of spinach to freeze as part of the 55 pounds of produce. This year my total is only 46 pounds and less than a pound is spinach. After I planted it rained heavily for several days and I think some of the soil and seeds were washed away.

One of my favorite crops is kale. I grow both Red Russian kale and a dinosaur kale - pictured here. Our new method of preparing the kale is to make "kale chips". I remove the large veins of the leaves and then cut them in half. My wife mixes these with olive oil and grated parmesan cheese and bakes them at 375 degrees until they are crispy. For the two of us it takes about a pound of kale, but that is pretty much the whole meal. I prefer the dinosaur kale because the leaves are more compact and make better chips.

Some parts of the garden are beginning to turn over. The crops that were in cold frames are mostly gone. These included mache, claytonia, kale and lettuce. All of them bolted or are beginning to bolt and about all that is left is a little of the lettuce and that will be gone very soon, probably to the compost pile since I have newer lettuce that needs to be used.

The potatoes look healthy and are beginning to flower. Garlic scapes have appeared and need to be harvested. It is also the season for weeds to grow prolifically.

The Mid-May Garden

The potatoes began emerging four days ago.

Because of the slow growth of my seedlings I bought some lettuce, broccoli, basil, and pepper seedlings at the Regional Market. Lettuce because we have eaten all the winter lettuce and all the lettuce that I put out in cold frames early in the year. My later seedlings just won't be producing lettuce to eat for a while yet - they are the ones that I started in inappropriate potting soil. Basil because I started seeds late - I don't know why I scheduled them so late. Broccoli and peppers because my seedlings are not growing. I may put them (and the tomatoes) out in the garden in a covered cold frame to see if the warmth will encourage them.

A new item this year is minutina. The seeds are extremely tiny and since it is hard to dole them out I have at least 30 little plants in each little pot. Today I decided to plant some out since they are a spring green. Supposedly they should be planted eight inches apart. It will be amazing if these little things that look like small grass stems will grow big enough to be that far apart. Or, considering how they were all growing together in the little pot, if they will grow at all. They will need the tenacity of lettuce to survive. This is one of this year's experiments.

We have grown very fond of ground cherry jam and it takes a lot of ground cherries to make the jam. The ones I started from seed were also in the potting soil that didn't work well. But it is said that if you once have ground cherries you will always have ground cherries. They are coming up all over the area where they were grown last year so I transplanted some of them to containers. This is one thing we decided to try in order to be able to harvest them more easily. I also am transplanting some of them in the area where they are already growing. I will also plant some of the ones that I started from seed.