The birds

How I used to feel in my spring garden.

This spring has been different in one very substantive way...I have not had to fight either the wind, the birds, or the insects in my garden. Right now there are potatoes, carrots, lots of lettuce and some spinach growing, which will mean a bountiful harvest until about June I would guess.

It's been so lovely to pass by the lettuce section of the produce department every time I visit the grocery store without needing to purchase any, after a couple of years of frustration in trying to grow it.

This year, it's different.

The trick, it turns out, is shade cloth. I will fully admit stealing my inspiration for this new addition from my friend Beth, who showed me her garden last year nestled under its white canopy of shade cloth. Seemingly free of insects and certainly not damaged by wind or birds, all her crops looked beautiful and I got a serious case of crop envy.

And so this year, I installed the row cover supports and put everything except the potatoes and onions under wraps. And it worked. 

Munched! A lapse of judgement -- no shade cloth -- quickly rectified.

I know all this made a difference because this morning, with a rainstorm coming in, I put in some spinach transplants, and figured a couple of hours without a cloth cover wouldn't make much difference in bad weather. The birds wouldn't be out and about, right? I was wrong. When I went back out the winged criminals were fleeing the scene, after picking apart one spinach transplant completely, and probably getting ready to move onto the others. And so, in the middle of the rain, I covered the rest of the spinach and left the birds to find forage in our pasture.

It may have taken me five years to figure out, but I think I finally understand the rules to growing here: grow it under wraps.

Spinach and Spinozad

Bountiful harvest.

After a slow start, I'm happy to report that I had the best spinach harvest since moving here, which I blanched and put up yesterday. It feels good to know we'll have enough for frittatas, dips, omelettes, and whatever else we need a little green in.

Amazing how little comes from so much once it's blanched!

The insects almost completely killed this crop. The only reason it survived was due to the thick nature of the leaves and the fact that they couldn't demolish the leaves completely, thereby allowing the plants to grow despite damage. Insects did kill all my spring lettuce, and after planting a new Globe basil plant yesterday I went outside only to find it reduced to nothing but stems. Completely killed in less than 24 hours! I was just dismayed when I saw the little basil skeleton this morning, and it strengthened a resolve in me to not let this be the end of my spring gardening. I also have two Ichiban eggplants that are getting attacked, but they will probably survive if I can take care of things quickly.

Eggplant damage

And so I will be stepping up my insect control game, starting now. No more traps with oil, soy sauce and salt. No more diatomaceous earth. I'm moving up to Spinozad. Unfortunately, Spinozad is toxic to bees within the first three hours of application, so I will be putting it on at sunset to make sure everyone's safe. Our evenings are projected to be down into the 30's, so I figure it will be sitting for about 12 hours before there are any bees about. That should make it safe for them.

RIP little basil.

I just can't keep losing entire crops to the earwigs, and this year there has been a banner hatch of them, probably due to having a decent amount of rain.

In the meantime, I'll just celebrate my spinach win and call it at that.

Onion/Spinach Harvest

My entire spinach harvest.

Yesterday was a busy, happy day spent doing my job at the winery, and today was a busy, happy day spent harvesting my spinach and onions.  You never know how your crop is going to grow every year, and so it's rare that you get the exact amounts of anything that you'd planned on. So it's either feast of famine in the garden.

Today, for instance, I harvested about six spinach leaves and about three metric tons of onions. (perhaps a teeny bit of exaggerating, but that's how it felt.)  I actually got about 3 store-bought bag's worth of spinach, and have about 30 pounds of onions -- half in the fridge and half still in the ground.  

So now I will be hoarding my spinach like a madwoman ("no you can't have a spinach salad! I am saving it!") and giving away onions to anyone who looks like they might need or want one, or even better, a whole bunch. 

The pathetic spinach crop is a shame, because I love adding spinach to different recipes -- lasagna, chicken casserole, omelettes, etc.  but this will be a lean year for that addition.  We do really commit to eating what we grow and rarely shop the market for anything we're able to put in the ground ourselves, so when we have a lot of something, it becomes a regular visitor to the dinner table, and when we have a sparse harvest, we do without. Farewell, spinach. Maybe next year.

.000001 percent of my onion crop.

But since onions are -- face it -- an accent spice and not usually a main dish, I have no use for a lot of this bumper crop. This year I am going to try freezing some for use in cooked dishes, which means I will not need to grow any for awhile, which will be nice. And since I've left half the crop in the ground, we have enough on hand for our fresh needs for several more weeks.

But just like life, the vegetable garden teaches you to be prepared for anything. Those raised beds are as full of drama and plot twists as your average soap opera, and adapting to what worked and what didn't is an ongoing thing.

And so I say a fond farewell to spinach for awhile, and hello to The Year of The Onion. 

There will be lots of onion tops in the compost this year.

Second (third, fourth....) Harvest

A few weeks ago, I cut away at my spinach plants, reaping a good harvest but leaving each stalk intact with a few leaves on each one.  Yesterday, I finally pulled the plants out and removed another big bowl's worth of spinach leaves. It was a marvelous second harvest of some plants most other gardeners would have removed after the first harvest, either because they didn't think they would produce again, or to make room for something else.

But many plants will come back again if you just harvest carefully, and leave enough leaves on the plant for photosynthesis to happen, with roots intact.

This cabbage plant is on its third season of production.  It was planted in winter 2012, and since then has produced no less than six heads of lettuce.  This started because I was initially too lazy to pull out the plant's roots, so I cut the cabbage head off and just left the rest of it alone in the bed.  Lo and behold, come fall 2013, there were another couple of heads to harvest from the same plant.  And now, in summer 2014, there are two more. The leaves may be bug-eaten and sorry looking, but the head of cabbage is still good.  Just in time for summer slaw.

And last summer, I again got lazy at the end of the growing season (if you're sensing a trend here, you're right) and left a few tomatoes on the vine, to ripen, fall into the dirt, and disperse their seeds.  And I have these volunteer tomatoes to show for it, every bit as big and lovely as the ones I painstakingly grew in the solarium this spring.

We talk a lot about the wisdom of recycling, but rarely do most of us think of allowing our plants to recycle themselves. 

For success like this, all it takes is being too busy to garden (and/or plain old laziness), some serious procrastination and some patience or just a willingness to look away for awhile while Mother Nature works her magic.

Bounty

This is the height of our farm's growing season, and I have a full refrigerator and freezer because of it.  So far, I've harvested approximately eight pounds (yes, pounds!) of berries, more salads than we can eat, lots of snap peas, and my first spinach crop since moving here is just about ready to blanche and freeze.  If posting is a little light right now, that is the reason.  When crops are heavy, posting is sparse ... just like spare time.  Makes sense, right?

I've also been dealing with the usual varieties of pests.  I've had birds in the berries, earwigs and a few aphids on the lettuce, and I believe the squirrels ate most of my ripening blueberries.  But with such a great harvest, I'm not all that upset about sharing some of the excess with the creatures who live here. None of the pest problems have overwhelmed the abundant harvest, which I think is a combination of learning the land and getting lucky with the weather.  We had no late-season frost, and no winds that I was not prepared for.

Speaking of the creatures who live here, I was pouring wine at the winery yesterday when a gopher snake came slithering up onto the patio.  Before any customers noticed, I went in and got one of the owners, who quickly caught it and placed it back out in the vineyard, where it could live another day to do some useful gopher control.  

Everything's showing up in robust abundance right now. Hope it's the same wherever you are!

The Bad Seed

I recently had a 100 percent failure with a packet of spinach seeds I had bought a few months ago.  I planted them both in my raised beds and indoors in peat pots and and absolutely nothing happened.  Zip.  Nada. Since I remember having trouble with spinach before this, I was tempted to simply write spinach off the menu -- once again -- for the next year, and accept that I can't grow decent spinach here.

But since we're having a long spring, I decided to try again.  I planted, and this time had about 100 percent germination rate instead of a 100 percent failure rate.  Since the first batch of seeds were planted in two completely different environments (one temperate and one cool), I'm chalking my failure up to a bad packet of seeds.

This can happen with potted plants, bulbs, trees and other plantings around our homes and property.  I don't think you can ever "call the game" on a particular type of plant until you've tried it two or even three times and it's failed.  

Of course doing some detective work doesn't hurt either.  If you think the soil is bad where you planted something, move it someplace else. If you believe weather might have been the culprit, wait until next year and move your planting date forward or back a few weeks or a month.

But bottom line, don't "call the game" on anything until you have made several attempts to grow something and failed each time. I'm glad I prevailed and bought that last packet of spinach that sprouted and took hold in the garden.  

When you work the land, it's typical to blame yourself, but sometimes it's not you at all, it's just some bad seeds, bad mojo, bad moon phase or whatever else helps decide what stays and what goes in our gardens. 

Rainy Day Tasks

After the storm.

We got a good soaking of rain this last week -- four days of it -- and we're now in the post-rain fog that always seems to come up until the ground dries out a bit.  Right now it's too wet to dig in the ground, so I am left with attending to other tasks.

But as astronomers have books for cloudy nights, surely farmers have tasks for rainy days.

I'm lucky that since spring is here, it's a great time to start this summer's seedlings.  Today I will begin with some spinach and lettuce, and move on to tomatoes later this week. I love to freeze spinach for casseroles, dips and lasagnas, and since last year's crop was destroyed by roly polys and I had to use wild mustard greens in spinach's place, this year I'm determined to get a good, healthy crop into the ground. Which probably means putting them in as transplants, when they're too large for the roly polys to destroy.

 Since I'm going to adhere to the local admonition not to plant my transplanted tomatoes before Mother's Day, my Mortgage Lifters and Brandywines will, likewise, have plenty of time to sprout and get sturdy between now and then in the protected comfort of our solarium.

I can't believe I just said, "in my solarium."  We didn't put it in, people.  It was the lady before us.  And what she used as a lounge area/art studio, we use to store Mason jars, dry fruits and grow seedlings.  Guess we've hillbillied it up a bit, but sometimes usefulness trumps aesthetics.

And as if the news couldn't get any brighter, Wednesday is when Farm Supply gets in a new batch of Bared Rock and Americauna chicks, so we' should be positively springing forth with new life by week's end.

It's funny, no matter how long and how hot summer is, once February is done, I feel done with winter and ready for the inevitable punishment summer usually turns out to be.  I'm sure many of you with harsher winters feel the same way.  I will certainly not turn down any rain we can get at this point, but fast-moving, water-dumping spring rains, not freezing winter storms is what I'm hoping for.