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!!