Spring Planting Redux: Summer's Salads

Four-day weekend -- with no rain and warmish sunshine -- let us get some things done and finish up the garden layout.

Tilled up a 4' x 10' patch of back lawn, and another 8' x 8' patch to add to the approximate 200 sq ft. of raised beds and tilled front lawn. Puts us at around 300 sq. feet, exclusive of of fruit trees and a dozen large pots. When we finish Spencer's patch we will be looking at about 350 sq.feet, a respectable space if I do say so.

Put down today (into the one of the new rock-walled beds) are lettuce starts (Romaine, red Romaine, oak leaf, red oak leaf, head lettuce) and spinach, all interplanted with some interesting English (Kew Gardens Brand) organic carrots.

Also down today a long strip of green beans (purple seed) adjacent to last week's snow peas, so two thirds of that box is planted. The last third will be some other nitrogen fixer (maybe a yellow wax bean) or some shelling peas or both.

Spencer's watermelon patch will get interplanted with potatoes for fall, and maybe a corner of broccoli.

The girls have requested more Roma tomatoes, and we will be definitely put Big Jim New Mexico chilies in from saved seed. Possibly bell peppers, and likely some red cabbage somewhere, although the cabbage may be headed for a big pot, as they are heavy feeders and we don't want them to compete with other stuff, or the soil-fixing effort on the south 40".

Still debating putting in a stand of broom straw somewhere, likely the front lawn . . . just contemplating how to make it decorative . . .

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First Pass on Early Spring Planting; Hungry Already! Is it Summer Yet?

Last weekend hand weeded about half the original "south 40" raised-bed of buckets of grass starts; after six or seven years of home compost, home worm compost and some store compost, and cover greens tilled under, the soil is now quite dark and crumbly, alive with worms. Great stuff!

Mid-week, we soaked some snow-pea seed we saved from last year's crop overnight and stuck it into a couple of long rows to beat the rain. A few seeds have floated up, but a quick finger poke has them back in the ground. Should be buckets of peas in a couple of months, and we will keep adding seeds every 3 weeks or so. Each new wave of plants should give us peas well into summer. Always fun to cruise the back yard for dinner, and steamed or stir-fried vegetables -- and especially the snow peas -- are really yummy.

Last weekend we also put a bunch of stuff into the ground.

Genovese Basil, about twice as much as last year, went in as seed. Until last year I had no luck with basil from seed, but these plants were champions. We whipped up and froze buckets of pesto (with HGO Garlic) in the fall, and if we are lucky, the new plants will be up and usable about the same time we run out of frozen stuff.

Kathryn thinned and transplanted last year's leek starts, and she should have plenty to grill up and put in her soup shortly; Hannah planted purple-seed green beans in her planter box, with second generation saved seeds. Spencer put down a watermelon patch, which we hand-tilled into the back lawn and surrounded with some of the river rock we collected on our permit a while ago.

We also took up a three-foot by 40 foot stretch of the front lawn with the mantis tiller, and put down two rows of corn (about a hundred plants), interplanted with Anasazi beans and sugar pumpkins, yellow squash and green squash. The plan is for the corn to act as trellis for the squash and beans. The beans will grow all summer and be picked and saved as dried beans for use in other dishes later; the squashes should be producing by late spring or early summer, and the pumpkins should be ready by August for eating (both savory, like squash, and sweet, as in pumpkin' pies) and saving for Halloween.

Leslie has tidied up her herb box and has several new and returning items to add to it.

If it dries up this weekend, will finish weeding up the south 40 and consider what to put in . . . I am tending to broccoli again, although last years crop was a big disappointment and I need to do some research to see what would be good as an alternate-year crop in that space.

We started the new year with only about 5 inches of rain on the season (since June 09) but have had 10.50 inches additional since January 1; nearly 3.50 inches in the last 24 hours.

All the other perennials -- especially fruits -- remain, and are beginning to show signs of spring. Mandarin oranges are fully ripe and quite delicious. What we have not eaten or handed out by March 1 or so, we may make into preserved fruit, or jam or marmalade. Might try juicing some too, but they are kind of small. Really fascinating juice though!

The scant five gallons of hard cider we put down late fall is nearly clear enough to consider bottling. It has promise, but it won't be clear what we have until at least May. This batch was all wild caught yeast, a strain that developed in a bottle of juice on the counter, which we cultured and then fed to the larger carboy. I actually drank most of the new cider that came from the wild caught (it was only a half-gallon) but came to my senses with enough yeast left in the sludge to feed and culture for the larger batch.

As we contemplate spring and summer harvests we are seriously considering two or three more of the hanging fruit dryers -- very effective and store nicely. I even dried racks of apples in my classroom over a rainy weekend -- which my students loved.

COMING SOON: What goes into the remaining South 40? How much of the back lawn will get tilled into river-rock raised beds? And will my neighbors complain if I put more of the front lawn into broom corn?