The last frost date for this area passed without incident on April 9th and today was my first day home to survey the perennials and sow some annuals.I'm just going to say it, my over-wintered herb garden is just darned pretty this spring. And I am beside myself that the chives are not just alive but thriving! After years of refusing to grow for me, they are vigorous and even blooming.I was also ecstatic to see the blueberries bountifully in bloom!Last year the blueberries were conned into blooming by the false spring and a hard, late frost killed most of the flowers. A feeble second bloom happened after the last frost but didn't amount to much.The strawberries were also a pleasant surprise, not just sporting a healthy head of blooms but some hard green strawberries already just waiting for the warmth of the sun to make them blush.I threw caution to the wind a few weeks ago and mixed up the assorted lettuce seeds I had on hand and sowed them thickly in 1/2 of a bed. I love the mix of the reds, greens and the little ones already wearing speckles.And lastly I laid down 18 rows of spinach in the front 3/4ths of these beds that will also host 2 tomato plants each in a few weeks.Ahhhhh...the gardener's Spring has finally sprung!
Read MorePermaculture Summer
To create your own permaculture summer:
Start with a good variety of fruits, berries and herbs that pretty much take care of themselves year after year.
Add to that background of growth, some tender green leaves (lettuce and spinach will do nicely) and one hungry rabbit.
Voila! You are back to your permaculture staple of fruits, berries and herbs with no pesky greens to worry about.
This, in a nutshell, is my summer.The herbs bolted and are setting seed now. The strawberries are producing well but I haven't covered the bed so the birds are beating me to many of the berries.The tower of asparagus is holding up very nicely under the accumulating mass of growth and the asparagus themselves are inexplicably sending up sporadic spears (3 in the pic below).The figs are plentiful and beginning to ripen. The birds also beat me to the first fig of the year but they don't seem to have seen the one on the other side yet.The blackberries are ripening by the handful daily and the blueberries are plentiful, but stubbornly green.The rabbit problem appears to be solved so now I am just patiently waiting for August when I can plant more greens for fall.
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Spring Again (Maybe)
The average last frost date for this area passed on April 4th but it has been an unusual spring with early season warming trends in February that encouraged strawberries and blueberries to bloom early followed by unsurprising freezes in early March that played havoc with the plants.My strawberry blooms mostly survived the hard freezes in March and these June Bearers are already showing off green fruits.The permaculture herb garden did very well over the winter, only dill and tarragon did not survive. The thyme is already blooming and the sage is just a step behind.Several asparagus spears were harvested in February then several more killed by one of the hard freezes, but they are loving the current weather and I am harvesting 5-7 spears every 2 days right now.I lost some blueberry blooms with the freezes, but they also seem to have rebounded more or less with new blooms coming in, though I anticipate a diminished harvest this year over last.Spring seems to be here to stay at last so it is time to start planting some annuals too!
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Strawberries
Seeing Red (And Green)
Today's garden science lesson: pill bugs can produce offspring up to 3 times per year and they like strawberries. Not all of the strawberries, of course, just a pill bug sized sampling of each.I picked berries between the intermittent rains this morning and for every two berries I put in my bowl, another one went into the compost some with the pill bugs still happily munching away.The leaf litter from last year's growth coupled with the shade from this year's lush growth has provided the perfect habitat for pill bugs and now that the berries are ripening, they don't even need to leave home to get dinner. I am going to try to clean as much of it as I can before I get to do the hard cleaning for winter.The Sugar Ann snap peas are coming in by the handful now. Enough to snack on while walking the garden.
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Strawberry
Berry Delicious
First* strawberry of spring!*technically the third one to ripen, but the first one that I beat the birds to. The strawberries are now covered enough to keep birds and squirrels out but let the pollinators in.
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Strawberry Jungle
A Berry Short Haircut
Last fall I had a niggle as I watched the lush, green growth of the strawberries yellow in some places and brown in other. I made a cursory search for winterizing strawberries and fall strawberry preparation and did not find what I was looking for, so called it good and lived in ignorant bliss all winter.This year, as spring sprung and my strawberry plants reached an almost concerning level of denseness while thickly mulched with some of last years dying and crumbling growth, I searched again and still came up with nothing and went back to my bliss and the rest of my to-do list.Then a few weeks ago I saw a video from Curtis Stone visiting a farmer in New Zealand, who, by the way, fetched 661 lbs. of strawberries off of his 600 first year plants discussing between 3:55 - 6:05, cutting down the current year's growth to force the plant into new, disease and fungus free growth for next year.My June Bearing Strawberries are already thickly in bloom, covered in green strawberries and tonight I saw the first blush of pink. Since I cannot do anything else until the end of this year's growing season, I went back to my research and found that a slightly different search term (cutting back strawberries) yielded the result I was seeking.This is one of those bad news/good news things.Bad news: The only thing I can really do between now and the end of season when I can cut back the green growth and make clean beds for next year, pulling out the older plants, making room for newer growth, is hand cleaning some of the decaying leaves, using them for mulch on very different plants so as not to transmit any fungus or disease between cultivars.Good news: In this case, that persistent niggle is my good news. I am far from an expert and I don't hold the title Master Gardener, but I am beginning to have a real intuition, a sense of what might need to be researched and considered for my various plants. I do consider myself a pretty good researcher and on this one I missed my target more than once, but I am feeling good that I have an idea of which questions need to be asked and will listen even more closely going forward. Answers, clearly, may vary!#Kaizen
Read MoreFinally Spring - Garden Update
The average last frost date for this area has come and gone and the lowest nighttime temp forecast through the end of the month is 41. I think spring is finally here to stay!The French Breakfast Radishes are speeding toward their 25 days to maturity and the Lollo De Vino Lettuce is by far, the prettiest lettuce I have ever grown.
The strawberries are already thickly covered in blooms and green berries.
And speaking of "thick", the June-bearing variety I have put out an outrageous number of runners. I tried to stay on top of it last year, giving away dozens of rooted starts and adding many more to the compost bin, but they still managed to do a little guerrilla gardening of their own, sneaking out some late season runners to plant offspring around the designated 4'x8' beds.
The blueberry bushes are also covered in unripe berries and continuing to bloom. This is their second summer in place and I am hoping the January pruning results in even larger, more plentiful berries than last year.
I am growing 2 varieties of Sugar Snap Peas this year, finishing out the last of my Sugar Anns and also growing a variety call simply Sugar Snap.
The collards and lettuces in the garden are off to a slow start which I attribute to the mostly cooler weather we have had this spring. With daytime highs starting to reach into the high 70s and low to mid 80s, I think their growth rate will pick up quickly in the next few weeks.And last, but never least, the tomatoes.
Of the 38 tomatoes that were emancipated at the end of March, I have 37 that are doing very well. The septoria leaf spot has dramatically slowed in it's progression since they were moved outside and the one Rebekah Allen tomato plant that was lost to a nighttime nibbler, has been reseeded indoors and will be replaced outdoors in a month or so.This weekend I will be sowing more herbs in the front and reseeding some of the spinach that has had less than stellar germination rates this year."In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt." ~ Margaret Atwood
Springing Ahead
After a week of travel, timezone jet lag and leaping ahead an hour, I returned home to find my spring garden well underway.
The blueberries and strawberries are already in bloom and hoping the 33 degree overnight currently forecast for Monday night doesn't damage them.
The collards, cabbage and kale have been hardened off and were transplanted yesterday near the sprouting spinach, pak choy, lettuce and sugar snap peas.
The 8 spears of asparagus that have been harvested so far have been well worth the 1 year wait and I hope some crowns that have not yet produced will begin to send up spears soon. In the meantime, I am becoming an expert on making a little asparagus go a long way in dishes.
Fall Cleaning
Unlike houses that only gently admonish us once a year with the expression "Spring Cleaning", gardens ask that twice a year we get down and dirty and work until our backs and legs are singing to bring a temporary order before allowing nature to rule for another half-year.This weekend I have begun the Fall Cleaning in earnest. After a year of unmolested growth and rooting, it was time to cut back the asparagus and the strawberry runners and bed them down for the winter.
The 5' asparagus plants looked like little Christmas trees even before the seeds turned bright red two months ago and mimicked ornaments. In the past couple of weeks some of the green growth had started to yellow and then brown, signaling the time to remove the above ground part so the underground crowns could prepare themselves for winter.Asparagus has a long and storied history going back at least 5,000 years to Egyptian times and has the rare distinction of appearing in one of the oldest known recipe books De re coquinaria ("On the Subject of Cooking") from the 4th or early 5th century AD.
My Jersey Knight and Purple Passion asparagus crowns were transplanted into my garden in the earliest part of 2015 meaning that I could not harvest anything this first year and could only watch as the tender shoots grew to and then beyond edibility stage and finally into the fern like growth above.Although I could not eat the shoots this year, nothing goes to waste in my garden and the green growth that had fed and nurtured the crowns all year were cut into 2-3" sections to be composted and feed future growth.
Once the asparagus and strawberry beds were cleaned up they were fitted with low hoops and covered with water and light permeable mesh that will hopefully keep the squirrels and pine needles out until spring.I have been looking into organic mulching options and ran across Leaf & Limb Tree Service's site that offered free wood chips delivered to your home (with some caveats). An inquiry has been sent and hopefully soon I will have my crowns bedded down for winter and am already looking forward to getting to harvest some of my own asparagus shoots next year!
Making Hay While The Sun Shines - Part 2
Even before the surprise bounty of figs arrived on my doorstep Saturday morning, I had a hefty agenda for my first full weekend back home in my garden in 3 weeks.Serranos - picking them at both the green and red stages, sharing some with friends and preserving the rest. My favorite methods for enjoying serranos in the off season are vacuum packing them fresh and whole and freezing or else sliced in half, seeded, roasted on the grill and then vacuum packed.
(roasted, vacuum sealed and frozen)
Cucurbits - I needed to put out 8 new 1'x1' boxes for the fall planting of cucumbers and summer and winter squashes to keep them from shading their neighbors in the garden as well as giving them a bit more room to spread out as well.
I will be making an A-frame trellis out of bamboo poles and chicken wire this weekend to provide a climbing structure for the back/north-most row that will have cucumbers and spaghetti squash. I am planting 4 varieties of zucchini on the front, south-most row which include 3 new variates in addition to the Black Beauty that have done well despite the invasion of squash vine borers.
I also removed the herbs from the middle garden bed in the above shot to make room to double my strawberry patch into a second box for next year with the prolific runners from this year's plants that I have been rooting in containers.
The most handsome specimens of rosemary, sage, parsley and thyme were put into terracotta containers and the rest were dried in the inaugural run of my food dehydrator, crushed and stored in spice jars.
To me, the expression 'making hay while the sun shines' means thinking about where the food on my table in January will come from when I am drowning in the abundance of summer.