Plant a Row for the Hungry

If you're still in the process of getting your garden in this year, give some thought to the idea of planting a little extra for local folks in need. Many local service agencies accept donations of fresh produce to distribute to our hungry neighbors. See Plant a Row Western Mass for details.

Even if you don't intentionally plant extra, this is a great way to share the bounty with people who may have trouble getting access to fresh produce, much less local vegetables. If you find yourself with more than you can use of something you're growing, pass it along! Right now we have an overflowing bounty of salad greens - and we're getting ready to go on a 10-day vacation - so I'm going to see if we can share some via the Center for Self-Reliance here in Greenfield.

Early Spring Planting

With the snow no long gone and the soil starting to warm up a little, this weekend was the time for planting the early spring crops - all those things that can either get an early start or that don't like the hot weather of summer. Lots of greens fall in this category, along with radishes, peas, and a few other things.

Yesterday we planted: snow peas, snap peas (sugar snaps and extra-early dwarf varieties), fava beans, kale, chard, spinach, bok choy, mizuna, arugula, sylvetta arugula (an extra-spicy "wild" variety), claytonia, mache, Persion cress, carrots, radishes, cilantro, fennel, scallions, and lettuce.

Today we are working on starting seeds for the warm weather crops that will grow inside from now until Memorial Day: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, melon, pumpkins, summer squash, basil, parsley, etc. I am probably forgetting a few. And at some point we are going to plant potatoes, a new crop for us. Yippee for spring!

Sorrel

I just picked a few baby sorrel leaves from the garden, which I will add to our store-bought local salad mix. Sorrel is a perennial, which means that once it's in your garden, it will come up year after year by itself, like chives. Also like chives, it will be one of the very earliest edible things out there. As the season gets along a little further, you can use sorrel in soup and so forth, but for my money it can't be beat as a salad addition. I love the tangy, slightly sour flavor. It's easy to grow and you can just harvest leaves off it all summer long and into the fall until a hard freeze.

My Garden Is Still Growing

What a crazy fall this has been, weather-wise. We started out with cold and frosts in September, but lately is has felt like late October has been going on for weeks and weeks. I keep wondering when winter will arrive and the ground will freeze. On the up side, while hard frosts took the tender veggies early this year, the cold-tolerant ones just keep going and going. We've been getting an amazing array of vegetables in our CSA box, and we still have all this in the garden: lettuce, kale, chard, cilantro, parsley, chives, carrots, rutabagas, sorrel, sage, oregano, mint, thyme, mustard greens, radicchio, arugula, and a couple other salad greens whose names I can't remember. (Of course, in order to have any of those things in a salad at dinner, I have to get outside and pick them at lunch time, as it is well dark by the time my workday is over...)

Late Spring Crops

As we get further into the summer, the number and variety of foods in season locally will explode, but for now we are still waiting and watching eagerly as each new one appears. Or at least I am!

Spring starts out with greens grown in hoophouses, asparagus, rhubarb, some herbs, and maybe some leeks that were either overwintered or grown in a hoophouse. But now that we are getting further along into the season, we are seeing green garlic, radishes, bunching onions and spring onions and a shift to greens grown in the field, while the asparagus, rhubarb, and herbs continue.

Now, at the beginning of June, we're at a tipping point. The really good stuff, the crops that feel like treats, are just about to start coming in. I have been harvesting my earliest snap peas in the garden and I expect to start seeing peas--snap, snow, and shelling--in the farmers market quite soon. The garlic in my garden has also just started forming scapes (stalks with would-be flowers), which are delicious. Growers cut them off to encourage the plants to form larger bulbs, so we'll be seeing scapes in the farmers market soon, too. And, of course, STRAWBERRIES! If we're lucky here in Greenfield, some of the vendors from further south in the valley might have early strawberries this weekend. Otherwise, we'll need to wait just a little longer. I am personally looking forward to picking some, maybe at Uppingil Farm in Gill, so I can stash them away in the freezer as well as enjoying them now.

The folks at the farmers market are always a bit ahead of my garden, it seems--some because they are further south and some because they are growing in hoophouses. So it probably won't be too many more weeks before we start to see other things like baby carrots, more summer leeks, more herbs, and maybe early fennel. As I wait for each new item to make its appearance, I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas--right down to imagining all the wonderful things I'm going to do with the anticipated treats.

Thanking the Weather Gods

This weekend, I planted radishes, carrots, kale, Swiss chard, arugula, spinach, lettuce, mizuna, and a few other kinds of cool weather greens in the garden, which is free of snow and dry enough to work the soil. Normally I think of this as an early-mid April activity, so I can only say thank you to the weather gods for providing a nice snowy winter followed by a quick melt without too much rain at the same time. Peas still need to go in, though we do have some very early ones getting started in the greenhouse.

The bigger job remaining to be done now is to get seeds started indoors for all the warm weather veggies--tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, herbs, and all that good stuff. This means giving over 1/3 of the dining room table to flats and lights, which is less than ideal (but the only available space safe from the toddler), but the results are so good it's worth it.

Parsnips

Yesterday I harvested the first few parsnips from our garden--we deliberately overwintered them to improve their flavor, and as the snow melts and the ground thaws, they are ready to be pulled. Most of ours are still under a pretty good snowpack, but one edge of the bed gets more sun and is already bare. We got the seeds planted late, so the parsnips are small, but I am looking forward to tasting them.

About half our garden is free of snow at this point, and other good things are starting to come up. We cleared the mulch off the garlic and found that it is coming up nicely. There is baby spinach that overwintered from last fall (not much of it, alas). The kale is producing a few new leaves, and the chives are starting to come up. A few more warm days, and I expect to see some more!

Seeds, Seeds, Seeds

We finally got our seed orders in this weekend, after ogling several catalogs for weeks. Each year, our garden ambitions grow larger, though we are constrained by the confines of our yard and the available sunlight. We live in town, on less than two tenths of an acre. While we have a great Southern exposure, there are some tall trees, and neighboring houses, that limit the amount of space that gets enough sunlight to grow vegetables. Far from the traditional rectangle, our garden's perimeter meanders and curves to take maximal advantage of the sun. Each year we see how much more we can cram in, and whether there are any other little pockets of possible growing space that we hadn't taken advantage of previously. Perhaps this is a little obsessive, but the joy of growing delicious food is so rewarding, we keep at it.

And, of course, one way to ensure that your food is local is to grow it yourself! We make no pretenses of supplying all our own needs from the garden--that just wouldn't be possible. But we grow things we like, and things that are expensive if you buy them (heirloom tomatoes, for example), and we freeze what we can for the winter. This year will mark our first full harvest season with a chest freezer, and I am looking forward to being able to put away more than I did last year.

So what will be going into the garden this year? Well, off the top of my head...13 kinds of tomatoes (one plant each), two kinds of sweet peppers, four kinds of carrots, four kinds of eggplant, lettuce, kale, chard, spinach, bok choy, mizuma, arugula, some other specialty greens, fennel, winter squash, summer squash, parsley, basil, cilantro, hot peppers, parsnips, rutagaba (my husband insists!), celeriac, three kinds of cucumbers, snow peas, snap peas, pole beans, and undoubtedly several other things that I can't think of right now. I can't wait! When will the snow melt?