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.
I had amended the soil last fall with compost from my bin system, but I wanted an additional 3/4″ of compost in a couple of my beds. For 4’x8′ beds, that works out to be 2 cubic feet per bed. I went ahead and picked up additional compost, along with potting soil and perlite for my containers. I’m using a 30%, 60%, 10% mix for those, so now I’m pretty much ready to go with them.
My 4th bed doesn’t get full sun all day, so that’s where I’ve plated a mix of beets (Golden and Detroit Red) along with 3 varieties of carrots (Mokum, Rainbow, and Short & Sweet). I didn’t have success with carrots last year, but I think I planted them too late and in soil that was too dense.
Between beds #2 and #3 along the arbor, I planted 4 varieties of peas (Sugar Magnolia, Oregon Giant, Champion of England, and Super Sugar Snap), and then filled in bed #2 with Red Tabby spinach and several varieties of lettuces (Arugula, Sunland, Summertime, New Red Fire, Tennis Ball, Bibb, Little Gem, and Black Seeded Simpson). That’s probably way more lettuce than we can consume. I always get carried away with lettuces! I also found a package of Chiogga Beets that I had forgotten about and planted those on the end.
Last weekend at the farmer’s market we bought some Little Gem heads from one of the farmers’ stands and made the most excellent composed salads with roasted beets, goat cheese, and honey-orange vinaigrette. I’m hoping that my crop of Little Gem will produce lots more!
With the weather so nice this weekend, I decided to work on replacing the fence running alongside the garden, a project that I’ve been procrastinating for months, mainly because it involved digging up 7 posts and I’ve been concerned that if I didn’t have a long enough block of time, that I wouldn’t be able to get enough of it re-built to keep the dogs from getting out.
I figured I’d at least try to dig up one of the posts just to get an idea of how hard the project would be, and to test out my grand idea of jacking the posts out of the ground with a farm jack and chain, which actually worked way better that I thought it would. One thing led to another, and in less than 2 hours I had all the posts out of the ground, which meant that I needed to go ahead and put new ones in. Fortunately I already had the replacement posts and Quikrete stashed away.
As if that wasn’t a job enough, of course I had to make it more complicated by digging up my PVC irrigation system to repair one of the spouts that I had broken off with the lawn mower last summer. So after setting the posts and a trip to the home improvement store for fence pickets and 2x4s, I spend a long day reconstructing the fence (or at least enough of it to keep the dogs in).
Meanwhile, back in the basement all of my peppers and tomatoes and most of my herbs have germinated and are growing under the new grow lights. Last year I planted way more seedlings than I could’ve possibly used and ended up throwing a bunch in the compost bin. This time around I’m going minimal and only planting 2 of each of the plants I’ll be transplanting later in the spring. That makes me a little nervous since there’s not much of a margin for error if I inadvertently kill my seedlings, but hey, it’s only gardening and I can always direct sow seeds outside in a few weeks and just deal with a later harvest.
So that’s where we are just 2 weeks out from the last frost date. It was a lot of work and I feel I definitely deserved a Gin Blackberry Thyme Bramble before dinner!
