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peas

Salad Days

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A tasty part of tonight’s supper.

I went out early this morning to harvest lettuce for our lunchboxes, and again after work for our supper. When I went out in the early dark, the air was heavily perfumed with honeysuckle. This evening, the fragrance was less pronounced, but it was there — glorious.

In the garden, lettuces are looking great, we still have radishes to pull, and there are a few green onions remaining.

Future supper ingredients.

 The peas are looking ever more promising, too. Pods are are hanging on the lower sections of the vines, while the tops of the plants are still covered in blossoms. 

The garden definitely is saying “Spring!”, but the weather is finally starting to say “Summer!”

Last weekend, the rain had stopped and the temperatures had warmed, and I finally was able to get more of the summer crops planted. Some were transplants that I had started inside, but most were planted as seeds.

The transplants were way past ready for the garden!

Happy pollinator in a sage blossom.

So far, for the summer garden, there are tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and tomatillos set out as transplants. Bush beans, both green and wax, were planted a three weeks back in the cool and wet, and they are showing the first flower buds.

Seeds of cucumbers, zucchini, melons, parching corn, sunflowers, borage, zinnias were planted last weekend. I have some basil seedlings ready to transplant this weekend, and the sweet potato slips will be ready to plant in two or three more weeks.

Melon seed was sown last week!

This is a great time of year to be a gardener! It is busy; there is food to harvest, and there is the promise of good-food-to-come.

Spring Veggies to Harvest Now, or Soon, and Delayed Planting

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We’ve been bringing in asparagus, green onions, and radishes, and there are little bits of lettuce to add to salads, but it will be a few more weeks before the beets and spring-planted carrots are big enough to add much mass to a meal.

The peas, though, will be ready sooner. The vines are in that covered-with-flowers-and-tiny-pea-pods stage, so I am pretty hopeful that we’ll have some peas with our meals in ten days or less.

There are herbs, too, which help bridge the gap to summer veggies, but we are going to need a very long bridge at the rate my planting is going. We have had mostly rainy and cool weather in the past few weeks. It has been too wet to work the soil for planting, and it has been too cool for most of the summer veggies to be happy in the garden, even if I had wedged them into the muck.

Tomato plants, for example, if planted in too-cool soil, often get a purplish look. This is due to a problem in taking up phosphorus in cooler soils. If anyone has tomato plants that have purplish leaves right now, it may be some comfort to know that the condition will pass, and that I’ve planted tomato plants too early before, too. Using a higher-phosphorus “starter fertilizer” for transplants on any affected tomato plants will speed the re-greening.

This year, all the gardeners who have installed raised garden-beds and filled them with fast-draining soil mixes are going to have an even better head-start on spring planting than usual. Just as the days (and nights!) really begin to warm, their gardens will be plenty dry for planting. I, however, am in the slow-boat with the local farmers, waiting for our red clay to drain and dry enough for planting.

In the meantime, there are birds and frogs singing, peony buds about to burst open, seedlings to tend, and the veggies of springtime to enjoy.

What’s In Season Now?

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Onion family crops to harvest in June.  Tulip to enjoy now.

I spoke with a guy last week who was looking for farm-fresh produce for a project at a local Senior Center. He was hoping for tomatoes and corn, and it was hard to get across the idea that those crops are not currently in season.

When we finally had that notion sorted, he asked about yellow squash. Let me just say now that the conversation went on in that vein for several minutes.


When he finally asked exactly what might be “in season” this week, I didn’t have much to offer. April is one of the reasons we dehydrate, can, and freeze.

Peas! They are a lot greener “in person” than in this picture.

Some local farms will have greens and other cool season crops ready for harvest at this point in the year, but my yard is “in-between.”

Kale and collard greens have bolted to flower. The parts of the crop I haven’t yet pulled up are so busy with bees and other pollinators that I haven’t had the heart to remove them.

Sprouts emerging from the March-planted spuds.
On sunny weekends, this is how we cook.

Lettuces and beets that were planted in March are still too small to make much of an addition to our meals.

The onion family crops in my yard survived the cold winter in good shape , but most of them are still a couple of months away from harvest.

The only onions ready for harvest now are the green onions.
The peas are putting out tendrils and just beginning to “run.” When the slivers of white petal first begin to emerge from the folded-up flower buds each year in late-April, I start to get impatient for the new vegetable addition to our meals.

Unfortunately, the plants don’t usually provide peas for the table until closer to mid-May.

The March-planted potatoes finally have sent up some nice, thick-stemmed top-growth. There will be tiny, new potatoes that could, in theory, be harvested in May, but I usually wait for the plants to begin dying down in June to harvest the crop.

Really, “what’s in season now” is a lot of waiting.

Time to Plant Potatoes and Peas

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The quietest starting “bang” I know is the unfolding of the trout lily flowers in my back yard. Their blooming is my signal that it’s time to plant potatoes and peas. Once those crops are in the ground, the new planting season rolls out before me. In years when the weather cooperates, all goes smoothly, but usually the gardening proceeds in little bursts.

This past weekend, with Joe’s help, the potatoes and peas were planted. Next weekend, if the forecast rain isn’t too abundant, I will be planting little patches of carrots, beets, lettuces, and spinach.

Even though there is a lot of available space in the garden right now, the patches for those cool season crops will be small because I want to save room in the garden for the summer vegetables, which will start going into the garden nearer the end of April.

As spring goes on, the planting will be interspersed with soil preparation work. That mostly includes adding as much compost as I can gather up, but it includes mixing in other amendments, too.

Before planting the potatoes, the compost added to their assigned space was the most mature/aged compost that I had on hand. “Younger” composts can increase the odds of the potatoes’ developing scab. A little bone meal (phosphorus for root development) and cottonseed meal (acceptable nitrogen source) also were mixed into the potato patch.

The pea patch got a small amount of a mixture of ground-up limestone (calcium), bone meal (phosphorus), and sul-po-mag (a rock source of potassium), along with a little compost. I didn’t add a separate nitrogen source, because when peas get too much nitrogen they get attacked by aphids; at least, that’s the experience I’ve had in my garden. If, as they grow, the peas look a little wan, I’ll consider adding a nitrogen amendment (like cottonseed meal) then.

I can see plenty of work ahead, but also the adventure of a new year of planting, and an abundance of good food.

Harvesting Summer to Make Room for Fall

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About 2/3 of my butternut squash harvest.    PHOTO/Amy W.

It’s been a busy weekend in the garden. To start, I harvested most of the remaining butternut squash. Six had already been brought inside, because the vine they were on looked “done.”

These in the photo to the right were also on some pretty dead-looking vines, but there are three more immature butternut squash out in the garden. After tracing their vines so I could determine whether they had a chance of further ripening, I left their vines behind when I removed the other, browned-out plants. So far, I have brought in about 25 pounds of butternut squash. That has opened up some space in the garden.

Browned vascular tissue caused by a tomato wilt disease.  PHOTO/ Amy W.

I also harvested all the remaining Amish tomatoes, even the green ones. In last week’s post I had mentioned that the plant had a lot of yellowed, drooping foliage, and it was time to pull up that plant.

After slicing through the stem to check on what had caused the trouble, it was easy to see the gunked-up vascular system, which often is caused by Fusarium wilt. A healthy stem would have been white or whitish-green all the way through, rather than being ringed inside with brown!

As space has opened up in the garden, I’ve planted some more seeds. Today I planted some kale, collards, lettuces, nasturtiums, and English peas. If they don’t do well from seed at this time, it won’t be a disaster, because I have started some of those in a flat already.

Caterpillar of the Gulf fritillary butterfly.  PHOTO/Amy W.

The English peas are part of yet another experiment. I harvested most of the popcorn, and as I was cutting the stalks down to chop up for the compost pile, I decided to leave them cut at about 3.5-4 feet high, for peas to climb up. The peas are planted in the rows between the cornstalks. It will be interesting to see how that space goes as the summer/fall progresses.

Elsewhere in the garden, we have some surprisingly unattractive caterpillars. They are dark orange with black spines, and they are busy defoliating the passionflower vine.

Bees loving a passionflower to smithereens. PHOTO/Amy W.

The caterpillars are the babies of the Gulf fritillary butterfly which also is orange, but it seems a lot prettier.

The passionflower vine is getting a lot of insect activity. In addition to being host to the spiky caterpillars, it also is host to some big, shiny carpenter bees that spend most of their days, it seems, loving on the purple flowers.

All that bee-loving action has resulted in the formation of a lot of “may-pops” on the passionflower vines. I am looking forward to trying those fruits!

The Future of Supper

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Spring is finally warming up, and in a big way. I’ve brought in a lot of the lettuce to store in the fridge, because the upcoming several-days-in-a-row of above 85 degrees F weather is likely to make what’s left in the garden turn bitter.

Peas beginning to form.

Some of the other crops, though, are approaching their most shining time in the garden. One of those crops is the peas, which are beginning to make actual peas in the several areas where they are planted.

Two of those patches will be left to make food for humans, the rest will be cut down — some to feed to my pet bunnies (who love pea shoots), and some to turn into the soil to feed the microscopic critters underground.

Potato foliage in the foreground, Allium family crops in the back.

The foliage on the potatoes is looking good, too. The little flowers indicate that potatoes are beginning to form underground.

Over the weekend, I added more compost around the leafy stems, partly to keep the soil as cool as possible for as long as possible, and partly to add a little more depth around the stems.

In general, potatoes are more productive when soil is “hilled” around the stems of the plants. The close spacing in these beds doesn’t leave much room for hilling up the nearby soil, but adding more to the top of the bed should have the same effect. At least, that’s the dream!

T
Big basket of spinach, that cooked down to about three cups.

Strawberries under netting.

I brought in the spinach over the weekend, too. It looked like a lot of food when I packed it all into the basket to bring inside, but that whole load of leaves cooked down to only about three cups.

We divided the cooked leaves into three portions and put them in the freezer for future meals.

Joe and I had been talking last week about our version of Shepherd’s Pie; when the potatoes are ready to harvest, we are going to want this spinach to make some.

Cilantro bolting to flower in the warmer days of May.

The strawberries are starting to add their bright color and flavor to meals (we had some last night). Straight from the garden, they taste like spring!

Other berries in the yard are in flower, but it will be a few more weeks before any of the brambleberries are ready for eating.
As the days have begun to warm, the cilantro has decided that it’s time to finish its life cycle and put out flowers and seeds. No one is especially happy about this development (it seems early), but I will be planting seeds for more, soon.

Meanwhile, we will all just enjoy what we have. Joe and I will be using some of the larger leaves from closer to the base of each plant in some guacamole tonight, and our bunnies will be eating some of the taller flowering stems that have bolted up from the base.

There is a little trellis behind the cilantro patch that I’ve planted a few “Greasy Beans” underneath. When the cilantro is finally in sad enough shape that I pull it up, there will be beans twining up from behind to fill that space. In my mind, it is already beautiful.

And this last picture isn’t of plants (or supper), it is of two Best Friends, Holstein and Darwin — two of my pet bunnies. Holstein is less symmetrical than she used to be. Her face is a little lopsided, and she lists to the right when she walks. The vet said she’d had a “neurological event,” which I’m interpreting to mean that she’d had a stroke. She and Darwin are usually pressed right up together, even when they are eating their bunny salad. They are happy to eat the good food that is growing in our garden!

Holstein and Darwin think everything grown in the garden is for them.

Potatoes and Lettuce and Peas (and More!)

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It’s been a beautiful day for getting things done in the garden, so of course I am running behind. I spent part of my day just sitting on the back deck, listening to birds and admiring the trays of seedlings that I had moved out to a dappled spot.

The good news is that the trout lilies are blooming in my yard, and that is my signal that the soil is warm enough that peas and other cool-season crops planted now will actually germinate and grow rather than rot in too-cold soil.

I’ve planted some peas, planted out some little lettuces that I had started indoors a few weeks back, and planted some radish seeds. If all goes well tomorrow, I’ll plant some more peas, lettuces, and radishes, and possibly also some spinach and beets.

Not all of the peas that I plant this weekend will be left in place long enough to produce peas; some are going to serve as a late-spring cover crop and will be turned back into the soil about six weeks from now. They will help get the soil in shape for the summer crops that will follow them.

The garlic, shallots, and multiplying onions all made it through the worst of winter and look good. I am hoping that the cold will actually help the hard-neck garlic! When the winter is warm, they don’t make as many cloves-per-bulb.

When those onion-family crops all come out in June, they will be followed by a late planting of tomatoes. The June-planted tomatoes won’t produce until late August, but they will give my tomato-supply a welcome boost when they finally begin to ripen!

I’ve also set out (possibly too early) some seed potatoes. On a quick run through Home Depot I saw a display of boxes of seed potatoes, and I found myself buying a pound of Kennebec potatoes in addition to whatever it was we went in for. When I got the box home, the seed potatoes already had good eyes, so after a few days I went ahead and planted them. They haven’t poked any green up above the surface yet, which is good, because there is more cold ahead, I’m sure.

I had already placed a small order through the Potato Garden for a pound of Garnet Chili seed potatoes (I grew them once before, and my recollection is that they were wonderful), a pound of Red Pontiac seed potatoes (good to eat and super productive in my yard), and a pound of Rose Finn Apple Fingerlings that a friend wanted a half-pound of, so we will be sharing those. The box of seed potatoes arrived in yesterday’s mail. None of the spuds in the box have developed good eyes yet, so it will be another week or two before those can be planted outside.

Really, though, the urge to fill the garden with cool season crops is very hard to resist; there is so much good food that can be planted and grown successfully now! Sadly, most of those crops wouldn’t be ready to harvest until sometime in May — well past the time when I will want to have some of my summer crops planted.  If I want those summer crops ready to harvest in a timely manner, I can’t fill the garden with cool-season crops now.

It helps that I spent part of my time at home in the last winter storm mapping out a plan for my 2014 garden; the map/plan supports my resolve to keep my hands off the packs of broccoli, collards, etc plants at the garden stores, so I’ll have space for all the peppers, squash, okra, tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, melons, beans, parching corn, etc. that I have planned to grow in my little garden.

Hope that everyone else is enjoying the beautiful weather!

The Seeds of Spring are Planted in the Dining Room

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In the best of all possible worlds, I would have a cute little heated greenhouse that I could start seeds in for my early spring/summer vegetable crops; instead, I have a big glass door and some fluorescent lights in the dining room. The good news is my current set-up, though somewhat limited in terms of space, works just fine.

Mid-Feb. is a little early for starting most of my seeds, but I am scheduled to give a presentation on seed starting on Feb. 19, and I want to have little plants up and growing for “show & tell.”  By then, it will no longer be absurdly early, and the people who sign up and start seeds with me at the talk will be all set for some successful growing.

My seedlings that are coming up now, on the other hand, are at risk of spending too long indoors and getting too lanky as a result. I might need to go find another light or two to help brighten my plant-babies’ lives and keep them stockier.

There will be some planting outdoors soon, too. I’ll be planting onion sets as soon as I can find them, and even though it’s a bit early still for peas, we are getting close. I usually judge the readiness of the soil by when the trout lilies bloom in my yard. I’m not seeing flowers yet, but the speckled leaves are coming up by the back fence.

Here in Cobb County, we have until about mid-March to get seed potatoes in the ground, but I have already dumped a load of compost on the spot where those will go this year. In the past, when I’ve had a chance to visit my Mom in Oklahoma in late winter, I’ve bought my seed potatoes at the little grocery store down the street from her house. They typically cost about 50-69 cents a pound, and they work just fine.

Since I haven’t been able to visit recently, Mom went to get some for me and put them in the mail. She picked up some Red Pontiac, White Cobbler (my favorite), and Kennebec.When those arrive, I’ll cut them into egg-sized chunks, each with a couple of eyes, and set them in a warm place to get them growing before they are planted out. The warm place will be (you guessed it!) the dining room.

Are We Sure this is Spring?

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It’s hard to take spring seriously when it is already looking so much like summer out in the garden. The zucchini have begun to make good-sized squashes, some of which have already made it onto the stove:

The first green beans will be coming in tomorrow:

And the peppers are already beginning to form. These, I think, are Spanish Spice:

These are Feherezon:

Is that not crazy? Elsewhere in the garden, the patch of onions that I planted from dry sets (little dry bulbs) all sent up flowering stalks before the plants even had a chance to make bulbs, so the harvest from that patch is not going to be what I had hoped for. In addition, the few good bulbs in the patch will need to be eaten fairly soon since they’ve been split by those flowering stalks.

The onions I planted from a little bunch of slender green starts made smaller-than-usual bulbs and then threw in the towel a week ago; the tops turned brown and fell over. Onions usually don’t call it quits until the end of June. Everything I’ve read indicates that the alternating warm and cold weather is behind the early maturity, and the early flowering, of the two crops.

The garlic is finishing early, and strangely, too. The leaves are beginning to yellow, so I pulled a couple of bulbs to check on how the crop is coming along. This is what I got:

It’s hard to imagine that these two garlic bulbs were growing within two feet of each other in the bed, but they were. They are different varieties, but the two shouldn’t be so very different in size! I am guessing that the rest of the garlic harvest is going to be equally strange; however, I am going to wait until the tops are absolutely brown before pulling any more from the ground. I’d like give any remaining tinies the opportunity to get bigger!

In the good news column, the Yellow Marble cherry tomato has been busy making little tomatoes. There are lots of these on the one plant of this variety:

Most of my other tomato plants, all started in the house in mid-March, are flowering, and a few have tiny tomatoes on them. Their timing is just about right, based on the usual unfolding of the gardening year.

Since the zucchini are being nicely productive right now, I went ahead and poured a little fish-emulsion fertilizer on them, to keep them going. It would be a shame to risk letting the plants slow down this early in the season!

Also today I turned under the pea vines. The harvest from the peas this year wasn’t great, but that is my own fault. It turns out that bunnies really like pea vines in their “bunny salad,” so I brought pieces of the plants in to Moonpie (our momma rabbit) and her babies most days while the plants were trying to make peas. I’m pretty sure I would have had more peas if I hadn’t kept harvesting pieces of the vines.

By Friday or Saturday, the vines will have decomposed enough that I will be able to replant that space. At this point, it’s hard to know what to put there. Some of my crops are running about a month ahead of their usual schedule. Considering the strangeness of this year’s weather and its effects on the garden so far, what will June and July be like? The answer, probably, is “continued craziness.”

Compost is fleeting…

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…but produce stickers are forever. I was scooping compost into my wheelbarrow, to use in the lettuce and spinach bed that I was getting ready to plant, when I saw (yet another) produce sticker.

I find these in my garden, too. Someday in the far-off future, an archeologist is going to stumble across the site of my garden and find this record of my family’s produce-purchases. It will be quite a find, I’m sure.

The good news is that, while I was out working in the garden, I noticed that some of the peas managed to survive their too-early planting. There are spaces I will need to fill in with more peas, but I won’t have to replant every last one.

The weather is beautiful today–67 degrees F and sunny. More of the same is forecast for tomorrow!