Early Vegetable Gardening

I'm in zone 5, bordering on 6 and warm-weather crops like tomatoes and peppers have to wait until May, sometimes LATE May, to be planted. Our late winters are usually very wet also. But don't let this stop you from planting cool-weather crops nice and early. If I had to wait for the garden to warm up and dry out so that I could run the tiller, I would be waiting a long time.

I went out the other day, March 3rd, and planted two types of lettuce, spinach and Sugar Snap peas. If all goes at least halfway decently with the weather, I should be eating salad by the end of April or the firt week of May. Many people wait until they can run their tillers to start planting, but here is what I do.

Take a grass rake and clear the leaves and sticks from an area you want to plant. Then scrape the ground (it was pure wet muck when I did this) with the rake and loosen up the soil. You don't have to go very deep, I probably only loosened to about 1 inch deep, if that. Then scatter your seeds in a wide row, my rows were about 1 foot wide. While holding the rake straight up and down, LIGHTLY tamp down the area with the flat side of the rake.

I didn't have any dry, loose soil to cover it but tamping the seeds down in that rough soil should suffice. Just for a light mulch, I grabbed handfuls of some grass cuttings that were in a pile from the fall, and lightly covered the seeded area to give it a light mulch.

I have been doing this for some years now and it usually works well. I have even had snow on my spinach before, but it didn't harm it. I am a very competitive person and it's always fun to eat a salad from your garden at the beginning of May, but I make sure to tell my gardening friends that I did so! Yes, I like to rub it in. This is about the same time most people are thinking of buying their seeds, but you will be eating from your garden already.

Here is a picture of what the garden looks like right now. Yes, it is trashed and I have my work cut out for me. But I still was able to plant the other day on the back side of the garden where it is cleared somewhat.



This will be a fun picture to look back on later on this year, after I have everything cleared out and the veggies planted.

Spring 2010 Garden Update

As you can see above, I cut my first salad this past Wednesday, May 5th. I use May 1st as a target date; last year it was about April 28th, the year before it was about May 5th. As I have stated before, I like to harvest my first salad at about the same time most people are thinking of breaking ground and buying seed. I'm fairly competitive, even with my gardening. I think they should come out with a full-contact gardening Olympic event.

Here I am cutting my first spinach, lettuce and pulling a green onion for salad



The two rows of green in the pic are two different plantings of spinach. I grew a lot of it and hope to blanch/freeze some of it.

You can't see it in the pic but in the back row is garlic, in between the two green rows are a couple rows of onions. I'm going to plant more onions from sets because I end up eating so many pulled early for green onions for salads.

My taters are popping through the ground too. Yukon Gold was the variety I planted this year. I've had pretty good success with that variety, and can't wait for my first 'new taters.'

Every year I try something new, and this year it is kale and collards. They popped through the surface just in the past couple of days. I just discovered collard greens this year, and really like them. I cook them with a piece of bacon added to the pot, then add vinegar to them when I am ready to eat them. That's how I learned to like spinach when I was a kid, the vinegar really made it good.

I also have Bibb and a Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce that are ready to be cut. You have to plant lettuce and spinach early, they don't do well after things heat up outside. I usually plant these early veggies about mid-March here in central Ohio.

Sugar Snap peas are an edible-pod pea variety and I planted two 10-foot rows of those, each row on other sides of a trellis. I trellis them with a couple of 2x2 posts with wire strung between the posts. What I don't eat fresh I blanch and freeze, then vacuum pack.

I have grown herbs for a number of years now, but increased my planting this year. Usually they are limited to my small herb gardens, but planted a couple of 10 foot rows of basil, and a row each of cilantro and parsley right in my veggie garden. I think I might be able to sell some of them at a local farm market(?) Even if I can't sell them, fresh herbs are a great gift and I will give a lot away to friends and neighbors.

Purple basil is something I discovered last year. It can be used as any other basil, but I infused vinegar with it and it looks beautiful. The vinegar turns a beautiful purple/pinkish color and has the basil taste also. So I am growing it again, but this year I am growing a row that is about 6 feet long.

Most of my perennial herbs are doing well again this year; sage, oregano, lemon thyme and lime thyme, chives (and some garlic chives.) I planted tarragon last year, for making tarragon vinegar, and didn't realize until this spring that it is a perennial also. It came up with a fury and my tarragon plants are already a couple of feet tall!

Tarragon:



I planted a LOT of sweet basil this year. I like to use it fresh in cooking, but a good way to use it is to make pesto. I make large batches of it then put it in ice cube trays and freeze it. Then I put the cubes in freezer bags. I can already taste it spread on a piece of homemade Italian bread, or a dollop of it in a pasta dish.

Here is one of my two little herb gardens as it looked the other day. I will plant a few more things in the spaces that are open. The 2 potted plants are my babies, my bay trees. You can't beat fresh bay leaves for cooking and you won't go back to store-bought, dried out bay leaves once you have tried the fresh ones.



The fall is when you are supposed to plant garlic, and I usually do plant it then. However, it just didn't work out this past fall, and I planted the garlic early this spring. If you plant in spring, the bulbs are much smaller compared to autumn-planted garlic. I had some HUGE garlic bulbs the past couple of years, and I am kicking myself for not planting it last fall. Oh well, there's always next year...

Just for kicks and giggles, I planted a line of Mammoth Sunflowers in the back row of the garden. That should look pretty nice, and they produce quite a few seeds for eating, roasting, etc

The temperature is supposed to go down to an overnight low in the high 30's this weekend, so I am going to wait to plant the maters and peppers. I can, however, plant broccoli and cabbage any time now, they tolerate cool temperatures very well.

My grapes (Concord and Catawba) are growing well too, and showing small flowers/bunches already. I need to spray them with Mancozeb soon, this will help prevent what I think is called black rot. The grapes will form normally, then almost overnight a black spot appears on the end of the grape and the whole grape dies, and dies quickly. One day you notice a spot on the grapes and in a couple of days your grapes are gone. It broke my heart when that happened a couple years in a row until I discovered Mancozeb.

I think I am losing my favorite tree, my sour cherry. Last year the leaves formed then a large number of the leaves just wilted, and I didn't get any cherries from the tree. This year it appears that the same thing is happening. I need to get a picture to the extension office or some other experts for their opinion of what is happening.

So the garden is progressing. I'm eating out of the garden already, but still have things to plant as soon as I can, and when the weather permits. Things are getting pretty exciting for this gardener!

Early Garden Progress

We are getting closer to the time when we can plant warm-weather crops here in central Ohio, but we aren't there yet. I was at a local nursery today and wondered how many of the people buying tomato plants were going to be planting them today or very soon. It's always a disaster when they try, more cold is coming sometime between now and the 2nd week of May.

However, I am going to experiment with some early tomatoes, using my Wall-O-Water plastic protectors. I started last year at the beginning of May using them, and they worked great. Now I want to push it up a week and try planting here now during the 4th week of May. I have heard people starting a lot earlier than this using the WOW's but I want to ease my way into it, and experiment with 4 Better Boy plants. I should be planting those tomorrow, and will report on their progress.

As I said in a previous post, I planted some early crops as early as March 10th. I also posted a picture of the spot, though it was bare. So here is the same spot as of yesterday, April 23rd:

From 2009 Garden

Left to right are spinach (Bloomsdale) looseleaf lettuce (Salad Bowl), bibb and romaine lettuce, and radishes. The romaine is from seeds I kept from last year, something I want to do more with other vegetables.


And nearby here are the peas (Sugar Snaps):

From 2009 Garden

So things are growing, thriving so far in the garden. The target date that I set months ago for that first salad is May 1, that might be a bit overambitious. However, the weather forecast shows that it is going to be quite warm between now and then, so we will see.