Four beds have been mostly planted in onions, carrots,
parsnips, spinach, lettuce and cole crops.
That leaves four beds that remain to be planted in potatoes and summer
crops. The potatoes were scheduled for
planting on April 18 but I’m going to put them in later this week. Cold wet soil can rot the potato pieces so
it’s better to wait when that’s a concern.
My rain guage showed 4 inches of rain Friday morning and 1 inch of rain
Thursday morning – 5 inches in two days – and the soil is well saturated right
now.
The
front bed in the pic is the potato bed and the back bed will be the squash bed. I won’t have to prepare the squash bed or
the tomato/pepper bed for two or three weeks – more time for the compost
to finish.
The seed potatoes - Kennebecs and Red Pontiacs - are on some damp wicking cloth and sprouting eyes.
The compost pile, which got a late start this spring, is hot now and
getting a little more finished each day. At
the end of the week I’ll put a wheelbarrow load of compost into the potato bed,
add some fertilizer, hoe the bed and plant potatoes. Last week I turned the soil over with a
shovel. Last year this bed was planted
in parsnip. I’ve noticed that any bed
that was previously planted in parsnip is very easy to spade over the following
spring. Parsnip does a great job of
breaking up soil.
This
is the “greens” bed, which was covered with a plastic greenhouse over the
winter. There’s lettuce, the first set of cole crops and
overwintered spinach. There’s going to
be a lot of spinach soon but that’s OK, spinach is at the top of the list of my
favorite vegetables. The greek oregano,
thyme and garlic chive at the upper end came back strong this spring.
I
harvested two spinach plants this week, 8 oz in all. Spinach has quite a taproot.
The
brassica bed has the second and third set of cole crops. I put in the most recent batch on
Sunday. There’s Major broccoli, Kolibri
and Grand Duke kohlrabi, Gonzalez cabbage and Summer Harvest cauliflower in
there. The larger cole crops in this bed
are the same size as the first batch in the greens bed, even though they were
seeded 12 days later, a reminder of the cold spring weather.
All of the lettuce, a pound so far, has come from the Earthbox. As soon as I pull up a plant another one takes its place. This week I harvested 7 oz.
I’ve abandoned some plants this year – no radishes or sugar
snap peas. I usually plant radishes on
the fringes of the squash bed but the soil was frozen so late I gave up on
them. The peas have been stopped by a
heat wave after Memorial Day for the past three years. I love snap peas but it looks like the rewards
don’t justify the short time of production.
Here’s
a reminder of how tough plants can be. I
had some extra broccoli, tatsoi and cabbage seedlings when I planted a set two
weeks ago and tossed them into the next bed.
Did they die? Nope they sent
roots into the soil and kept growing.
