Mowing in March?

It's true.   The grass got a bit shaggy around the garden plot (this is the sunniest spot on our property so the grass gets the longest here) so I dug out the mower, cleaned the spark plugs and blew out the air filter, and mowed the grass.  When I laid out the garden I thought it would be a good idea to leave grass strips so keep weeds down and keep up from walking on the places we plant.  It has worked OK, although the grass tends to encroach on the garden and vice versa, making it hard to mow with a mower.  So far it is superior to mulch, which weeds seem to like to grow through anyway.

Week two of the EoE garden saw much cooler temperatures-only 5 Growing Degree Days (GDD) compared to 90 last week.  I dumped 0.4 inches of rain this week to add to the 0.8 from last week.

The secret of Popeye's strength

No, that's not grass, it is spinach.  Like lettuce it has two cotyledon leaves, but they are elongated.  But enough of this chit chat, let's get down to the meat of this post: I hated spinach when I was a kid.  The only way I ever saw it was canned--a slimy green mass that I was convinced was inedible no matter what it did for Popeye.  However, times change, and now I know about all the mysteries of life, like Spinach Quiche, and fresh spinach on a salad.   And the great irony, I have even ordered cooked spinach all by itself in a restaurant--and enjoyed it.  I mean--what's with that?

Small beginnings

Pictured is a  clump of leaf lettuce, just emerging with its two little cotyledon (seed) leaves visible.  I planted 4 such clumps of 4 different salad greens (they will be thinned when they get bigger--I over planted as I didn't know how good the germ on the seeds was going to be)..  Greens are one of my favorite garden veggies, because they are easy to grow and give such immediate satisfaction.  You want a salad?  Walk out the back door, pick it, wash it, and toss it together.

Give Peas a Chance

Today's crop o' day are peas.  Creepy, huh?  Well not yet, but they will be.  That is why I have provided something for them to creep onto.  Inexpensive tomato cages make a good support system for peas, but ironically not very good for tomatoes.   An average tomato plant will overwhelm a cheap tomato cage, and the first good wind they crumple.  So this particular tomato cage has been assigned to pea-duty.  Sure, its a demotion, but whose going to find out?  Not like I'm going to post it all over the internet.   Oops.

Asparagus

You may not be a fan, but you should be.  I grew up eating this as an overcooked mushy vegetable, mostly in school lunches.  In reality it is an easy to prepare and delectable seasonal treat.  From now and for the next several weeks we can have almost daily harvests of the stuff.  After that it is a spectacular and showy plant.  Our patch is in its 4th year, and the 2nd year of harvesting (it is good to let it establish until the 3rd year).  As far as I know, this patch can grow perpetually if not over harvested.

The week in review

The first full week of the garden year was just about perfect.  We received 0.8 in. of rain total, and had 90 heat units, which would have been very nearly enough to get corn to emerge had I planted corn.  The only time the temp dipped below 50 that I can remember was yesterday morning, when it was a chilly (but still above normal) 40 degrees.  Last year at this time it was 8 degrees!

Stand back

Depending on which of my children you ask, today's highlighted garden crop is either the source of frequent delightful summer deserts, or a poisonous threat to national security.  I really enjoy watching rhubarb grow in the spring because it comes on so fast and results in such spectacular foliage.  These particular plants were rescued from the back of our property where I kept mowing over them the first year we lived here.  I finally dug them up and moved them to a more featured location.  Since I took the small fence down from around the garden, the bunnies like to live (or at least loiter) under their foliage

And the winner is....

I know you have been waiting with impatiently to find out which of our contestants (see "For the record", March 18)  would emerge, ahem, the winner of the race to the surface.   Well, it was our odds on favorite, the Cherry Belle Radish.   We knew it all along, and that is where the smart money was.   But the snap and snow peas finished respectably, as we will see in a later post (a little dramatic foreshadowing for you author types).

Hey bud, nice seein' ya

One of the most anticipated sights of spring are buds on the apple trees.  We have two apple trees--a Zestar and a Honeycrisp.  The Zestar is the earlier of the two to flower and fruit set, and apparently to putting out leaves as well.  These trees are only a few years old and haven't borne a crop yet (we did get one small apple from the Honeycrisp in its first year). One of the years we received a late frost during flowering, and with the early start this year, that scenario is possible again this spring.  I am working on my strategy for protecting these dwarf trees in the even that a freeze is predicted during a critical stage.

Playing to the crowd

Here's a shout out to my two followers on the blog.  Saturday morning they teamed up to make an outstanding lemon curd coffee cake, pictured below:

Believe me, it tasted as good as it looks!

Vern L. Equinox

After a week of summer-like weather, we can now say that spring is here since we have come to the vernal equinox--that biannual point when the earth looks the sun in the eye.  The local weather has changed to accommodate--we got a nice 0.4 inches of rain yesterday evening, and the forecast is to be drippy today.  The seeds I planted Saturday are lovin' it.

For the record

One of my main reasons for starting this blog was to motivate me to do a better job at keeping track at what I have done in the garden, so it's time to record the varieties I planted yesterday:

Buttercrunch Bibb Lettuce  (2009)

Simpson Elite Loose Leaf Lettuce  (2009)

Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach (2011)

Parris Island Romaine Lettuce (2010)

Rainbow Swiss Chard (2010)

Cherry Belle Radish (2010)

Early Snap Pea (2010)

Dwarf Grey Sugar Snow Pea (2010)

Nearly all our seeds come from Farmer Seed and Nursery Company, a catalog seed company that also has a retail store in our home town.    Very handy.   The year purchased is in parenthesis.  We'll see how good the germination is-- I over planted and expect to do some thinning.

Journey through the garden year

Welcome to my blog.  The purpose of this blog is to take you, the reader, along with me on a journey through the garden year.  We may take some side trips along the way.  This is my favorite time of the garden year--the time when last years perennials come back to life and the garden is all possibilities.  It is also when I have the most time to devote to gardening, and before war is declared on weeds.  I live in Minnesota, and in a good year we start gardening in April, with May not too late to put a garden in.   This year we are having a warm and gorgeous March, with several days in the seventies.  This past winter was a dry and mostly snow-less season, so the garden was fit and ready to go on St. Patrick's Day (today).  So in go the lettuces, radishes, and peas. The herb garden is coming to live as well (see chives above).

The title for my blog is from Genesis 3.  The Bible begins in a Garden and ends in a Garden-City (see Revelation 22).  So, in a sense, all of life is trying to get back to the Garden.  In between times, we are East of Eden, toiling among the thorns and the thistles, eating our bread "in the sweat of the face."  Despite this curse on the ground, by God's grace the earth still yields food for us, as Psalm 104 says: "He causes the grass to grow for the cattle, and vegetation for the service of man, that He might bring forth food from the earth, and wine that makes glad the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread which strengthens man's heart."