Having a steady supply of flowers blooming over a season provides pollen and nectar for pollinators. This season flowers started a bit slower than usual, but with some heat and two major rain events they are now moving ahead of usual bloom time. After the trillium, the woods here fill with wild geraniums. They are a small pink flowered plant. Then we have a wild apple or hawthorn tree …
Greetings from the Garden! This week’s CSA box has lettuce, spinach, salad mix, beet thins, French breakfast radishes, green onions, asparagus, and herbs. Field Notes. The word for the week is PLANTING! Ken has been busy on two fronts: moving up seedling for future greens and crops, and getting roots like potatoes, leeks, seeding in carrot and beet and burdock root. There is also the maintenance tasks – with …
Ken is always starting plants – greens, herbs like cilantro that bolts, etc When he is unsure of the germination rate, he sows in trays, and then moves to soil blocks He makes the soil blocks He then moves the tiny seedlings into the soil blocks, fills with soil, waters and once they are large enough they go out in the garden or field. This means thinning …
Each season as flowers bloom I remember which kind friend shared them from her garden. Right now I have two from my friend Lesa from at least twenty five years ago. One is a bicolor and the other is a beautiful lavender This one is from Janette. So, in addition to beautiful flowers, I have deep gratitude and beautiful memories
One of the annual tasks here is putting up the pea fence. Peas are a relatively short season crop. Their production varies with weather. Too warm and they simply give up. So putting up that pea fence is an act of faith I have ordered several different varieties over the years. I keep hoping there is one that really doesn’t need a fence. In my over twenty years of picking, I can emphatically …
I love strawberries. We grow strawberries, but are limited by several factors such as time and space requirements, my physical condition, price, and uncertainty of production. What do I mean? Strawberries take space that could grow crops with significantly more production and less labor. Ken plants them, weeds strawberries several times, composts, pulls out some of the runner plants, transplants, and maintains the crop over multiple seasons. Imagine transplanting cabbage or broccoli, weeding once and …
Greetings from the Garden! This week’s CSA box has lettuce, spinach, salad greens, braising greens, radishes, green onions, asparagus, and herbs Field Notes. Since we have had drier weather, Ken has been busier than ever! Many things are behind the usual planting schedule. He has been planting and transplanting: onions in the garden, greens in the garden and by the mobile tunnel, sweet potatoes in the field, replanting washed out carrot seed, watching the beans …
The mobile high tunnel is now over the heat loving summer crops. And even though we have gotten lots of rain recently, very little of it goes into the greenhouse – even when Ken opens it up all the way. So, Ken irrigates the plants. He moves hoses and uses an irrigation pump to get water from the irrigation pond to the plants Then the water moves from his trenches between the plants to …
Geese are part of the crew here. They not only eat grass, provide us with eggs in spring and meat in fall, they also act as a back up to our canine security system. They only time they are aggressive is when they have eggs or babies to protect This spring the first batch is growing quickly. Although they aren’t fully feathered out, they are no longer the roly poly puffy downy balls …
Ken has been trying to work around the weather. It sounds a bit like Goldilocks and the Three Bears – too wet, too cold, just right. He finally got to put in several seedlings and now there are rows of small plants. Soon they be large and form canopy and fill the garden with green. With the last “weather event” of nearly 2 1/2 inches in under an hour, and close to 6 inches …
