A photographic tour of the spring garden

Bed after cover crop has been removed, shredded, and laid back on top to decompose. It's waiting to be forked in!


Cover crop waiting to be removed from the bed - yes, there is one hiding underneath all that foliage!


Spectacular red clover with one volunteer poppy that just popped up today.

The asparagus bed before the morning's harvest.

Mixed mustards, a couple of small lettuce and the few onions you can just see in the rear at the left.

Winter Marvel lettuce in front; Winter Density lettuce in back.

The cabbages; one will be lunch tomorrow!

Freckles lettuce in back; Winter Density in front.

Swiss Chard.

Rossimo, one of my new favorite lettuces - big frilly leaves.

Mostly Little Gem lettuce plus one Freckles.

Arugula - great, strong taste, not like the wishy washy kind you can buy in the store.

Purple sprouting broccoli

Mixed mustards on left; Georgia Collards on right

White Russian kale

First tomato seedlings sprout!

Today when I went out to the greenhouse to water, I found that the first of the tomato seeds have sprouted! There are four pineapple, three orange king, and 1 or 2 lake tomatoes that have just broken through to the light. It's quite warm in the greenhouse if we keep it closed up (90-100 degrees most days) but sometimes we open it to the air so it cools down. We bring the trays into the house almost every night, although occasionally we forget.

Not much other activity happening at the moment. A lot of yard mowing and whacking by Penny but the beds need us to put some time into them. We're going to create a list of tasks tonight - that will make me feel like we're doing something!

We are eating a ton of aspargus - mostly just steamed or sauteed with basically nothing added. When things are so fresh, that don't need seasoning. When a salad goes on the table straight out of the garden, I only add olive oil, salt, and pepper - and very little of those.

Also good is picking miscellaneous leaves of greens (kale, collards, a variety of mustards) and just tossing them in a pan with some olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper and cooking them lightly until they're just beyond wilted. They're great with any kind of grain.

I think we're doing more eating than gardening!

Summer plants are on their way!

On Sunday we planted:

• four each of four kinds of winter squash (starts in the greenhouse): Japanese Red Kuri, Guatemalan Blue, Burgess Buttercup, and Butternut.


• Six each of seven kinds of tomatoes (starts in the green house): Arkansas Traveler, Lake, Orange King, Pineapple, Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, and Camalay. The last three of these were from the FoCuS seed exchange event.


• Thirty seeds of White Lisbon onion (starts in the greenhouse) which can apparently be either bunching onions or bulb onions.

We don't have a heat source in the greenhouse for overnight, so every night we carry the trays into our kitchen...and back out to the greenhouse in the morning. We want to help keep the soil warm.

I have discovered that our greenhouse actually make a great sauna or steam room! It gets hot it there even on the mildest of days. So today, seeking moisture for my poor coughed out bronchii, I watered the gravel on the floor, put a lawn chair in and drank my after lunch tea in there. In a half-hour I was drenched in sweat! I'm sorry no one else was home to take a photo of me with me tea that I could post with this.

The asparagus beds have now taken off like a shot; we are harvesting 15 or more spears a day. I don't mind one bit. In fact, I'd better go cut some right now.

The cabbage heads are growing bigger and firmer. It's time to find some creative cabbage recipes so they don't go to waste.

Late...again!

We had a plan for our summer vegetable seed starts. The essence of the plan was to get them going in the greenhouse in early April. It's now very mid-April and the greenhouse is empty of growing things (except for a few weeds coming up through the gravel floor). We can't blame the weather this time. It was a good week for planting. But I got sick about a week ago and since then I have not done anything that I had been intending to do (or very little of it, and none of it in the garden). The rest of the family is fine, but busier than usual, especially because I am not! She did manage to pull out about half the cover crop....a bit later than it should have been done. We have heard the guideline that it is best to get it out when it is about half in flower. I think ours may pretty much be full in flower. Our plan is to let it all dry out and the see if your new shredding machine will grind it up so we can more easily incorporate the organic matter into the beds. I've been appreciating Carol Deppe's sentiments in her book The Resilient Gardner: "My garden needed to be designed around the reality that life has its ups and downs. It has good times and bad. How to garden in the best of times was not the issue. I didn't need a 'good-time garden.' I needed to understand more about how to garden in hard times. I needed a more resilient garden." And her book is about that, although at this point I have not had time to read much of it. She also talks about a garden that is resilient for the possible changes ahead of us. She puts emphasis on the five crops that could see us through: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs. We have had success with squash, we're hoping to find a way this year to grow potatoes that works, and chickens are part of next year's plan. Beans are distinctly possible, and we need to find a space large enough to grow corn. Fortunately, all our beds with the relatively new transplants are doing well. The lettuces are becoming teenagers and we can start eating some again soon. Mustards, collards, kale are all coming along well - even the few straggling, bunching onions! We ate our first home-grown cabbage the other night! Yummy and fresh and crunchy. We made the head into a crunchy salad and the next day used some of the large outer leaves for cabbabe rolls. Our asparagus beds this year are, so far, thin in their production. We have had a few to eat, but there are big gaps in the beds and the ones that are up are very slow to get tall enough to harvest. We aren't quite sure what is going on, unless it was just the unusally wet late winter and early spring. The new plum tree has yellowing leaves and the mini-nectarine has a worse than usual case of peach-leaf curl. It is an ongoing challenge to have a healthy, organic garden when you are a part-time gardener!!

Cabbage and time

I think I promised a picture of the cabbages. It has been lovely gardening weather this week....and we have had absolutely no time to do it! Some morning we did squeeze in planting the last tray of seedlings from the greenhouse: 12 freckles lettuce, 12 rossimo lettuce, 11 little gem lettuce, 12 arugula, 12 winter marvel lettuce, and 12 winter density lettuce. The last two are somewhat ironic given that it has been feeling like early summer! Somedays we have to water three times to keep these little guys from fading, and we are covering with shade cloth every day the sun is out. The next two days hold the promise of some more rain and maybe even a little snow, so they should be happier with that.

It is truly time to be starting some more seeds in the greenhouse - summer crops! And also to get the cover crop cut down and folded into the beds. We just got a new chipper/shredder machine which we have high hopes for - hoping we can feed all the cover crop into it so it will be in a good form to add some back into the beds. We'll let you know how it works!

Here are the cabbages - they look great, and we haven't taste-tested them yet.

From winter to summer

Last week we were lashed by rain and winds and the woodstove was continually pumping out heat. The last two days we have been out in short sleeves, sweating, the doors and windows open. Right before this mostly pleasant weather change we planted out all those sweet little cool weather seedlings. These days they are gasping and often flattened to the ground with the heat. We finally gave them some shade cloth, but hope for some cooler temperatures. They should have another month or two to grow and thrive; I think these days are a false summer.

Cooler predicted for tomorrow so we are waiting to plant out the tray of lettuce seedlings. All the old heads of lettuce will come out of the ground tomorrow, too. Some is old and tough but there will be some that can be saved for some good eating.

Our first trial of cabbages is actually having some success. I should take a picture! The plants are huge and many of them are actually forming heads. Wow!

Mowing is happening, too, as the rains have made all things green shoot up all over the property. We still have some kale in the refrigerator from the harvest of those plants, so here are a couple of good ways to use that.

Kale Salad (from the Esalen Cookbook):
1/2 cup Braggs Liquid Aminos or tamari soy sauce
1/3 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil or flax seed oil
1/2 medium size red onion
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup sesame seeds
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
1 pound fresh kale 1/2 cup sunflower sprouts (optional)
1 avocado cut into 1/2 inch cubes (optional)

(Note: The amount of dressing seemed way too much for us, so we reduced the amounts. But I don't think we used a whole pound of kale either. We have not tried either of the optional elements and it is great without them.)

Combine the Braggs and lemon juice in a blender or whisk it in a bowl. Slowly dribble the oil in and blend or whisk vigorously. Slice the onion into thin half moons and marinate in the dressing as you prepare the rest of the salad.

Toast the seeds in a heavy-bottomed pan over medium heat until seeds are just golden and fragrant. Toast each seed type separately since they toast at varying roasting times. Cool them to room temperature.

De-stem the kale (you can use the stem/vein for soup stocks). Stack the leaves and slice into 1/4 inch ribbons. This is the most important step so take your time. The success of this recipe lies in cutting the kale into small ribbons and completely massaging the kale with the dressing.

Toss the seeds, sprouts, and kale together with the marinated onions and as much dressing as necessary to lightly but completely dress the kale. Massage the dressing into the kale with your hands. Add the avocado and toss again with your hands.

Thank you Esalen Cookbook - and Penny who makes this for us in our household. We served it to guests a couple of weeks ago and it was a great hit with them. Everyone was surprised to be eating raw kale!

New Favorite Green Soup - from the New Laurel's Kitchen:
1 onion or 1 bunch scallions
1 tablespoon oil or butter
2 or 3 potatoes, cut up
6-8 cups chopped fresh greens (chard or spinach, they say, but I would add kale, too)
broth or milk
salt and pepper

Saute onion in oil or butter until very soft. Add the potatoes and water to cover. Cook until tender and remove peels if you desire. Add greens and simmer until they wilt. Puree all. Add broth or milk to thin and extend if you wish, then add salt and pepper to taste. Easy and yummy!

Penny is also the green soup maker.

It took forever to get this post formatted so you could actually read the recipes!