EdHart.me
There’s a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from building a meal around ingredients you’ve grown yourself. This salad started with a spring walk through the garden and a basket filled with fresh beets, peppery arugula, and tender lettuces ready to harvest. Moments like that are part of what makes gardening so rewarding, watching something move from seed to soil to the dinner table in a way that feels both simple and deeply satisfying.
We’re well into the growing season. Easter has come and gone, and we’ve already had several lettuce harvests that have made for wonderful farm to table salads! The big winners have been Roquette Arugula, which has always been reliable for me, Summertime, one of my favorites as far as flavor and texture go, and a new variety that we’ve tried this year, New Red Fire. Yields of Sunland have also been decent. More on that below.
I’m a few weeks into the spring gardening season, even though it’s still over a week until the spring equinox and 2 weeks before the average last frost date. The weather has taken a turn for the better after a month long stretch of cold temperatures. Although my plan had me planting beets, carrots, peas, and lettuce this week, I actually planted them 2 weekends ago after the long range forecast in my weather app showed springlike conditions for the foreseeable future. So far that gamble seems to be paying off.
It’s mid-February and I’ve started planning out this season’s seeding and planting schedule, this time with a little help from ChatGPT.
This growing season is the first time that I’ve started tomatoes from seeds inside. I’m attempting 5 varieties this year! In this post you’ll find a free plan for a planter box for 5 gallon bucket tomato plants.
This year I finally decided to build a composting system to enrich the soil in my raised bed garden. Here’s an assembly schematic for building your own 3 bin compost system. There are a lot of plans on the internet for cheap and supposedly free compost bin systems. This is not that! This is a well designed 3 bin system designed to last for many years and also look nice. I riffed on a design that’s in the vegetable garden area at my local botanical gardens, and I’ve tried to incorporate a few specific features.
A couple weeks ago, Laree and I drove down for a morning respite walk in the middle of the covid lockdown, and as we parked and made our way to the sidewalk my eye caught an odd looking weed in the street. It turned out to be a tomato plant that had wedged itself between the pavement and the street asphalt. This also happened to be the same weekend the riots broke out downtown after George Floyd was killed. The world is a mess right now.