Good gardening weather at last! Sowing peas, harvesting garlic scallions!

Our greenhouse full of seed flats and sunshine.
Our greenhouse full of seed flats and sunshine.

Well, the photo is from another year, a few weeks later than now, but it gives a good idea of how full our greenhouse is. Currently the main user of space is broccoli. We have also started moving plants out to our coldframes, to free up space inside, and to harden off the plants ready for planting out.

We still haven’t done any tilling or disking, but if all goes well, we’ll do some tilling tomorrow and Thursday, before the next rain. Then we’ll work like crazy to make up for some of the time lost to snow and ice in the past month.

We have managed to sow our peas! It feels like such a triumph! We decided we didn’t need to soak the seed overnight as we usually do, because the soil is so wet. As I said last week, we sow peas in the middle of spinach beds. Several advantages-

  1. No need to wait for the soil to dry out to till – just hoe and sow.
  2. The spinach already has rowcover, which the peas can share.
  3. The peas will grow vertically, not encroaching on the spinach.
  4. As the spinach gets ready to bolt, and we pull it out, the pea plants are getting bigger. This “relay planting” makes good use of space and time – more efficient than using two separate beds for the two crops. (There’s more about relay planting in my book.)

30118_grandeBut, oh, the vole tunnels in those cozy row-covered beds! How to get rid of voles? Voles love pea seeds, so we have set out lots of mousetraps baited with peanut butter. We have flags marking the spots where the traps are, and the intention of checking them every day and re-setting them as needed. I like the Intruder Mousetraps (they aren’t paying me to say this!). They’re easier to set than the traditional wood and wire ones, and much easier to empty. Just squeeze the back flap to open the trap and shake out the creature competing for your food.

Sugar Ann snap peas. Photo credit Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Sugar Ann snap peas. Photo credit Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

We have a short spring here, and a hundred people to feed, so we don’t grow shelling peas. It would just take too long to pick them, too long to pod them, and the harvest season would be too short. Peas don’t thrive in hot weather. Instead we grow lots of Sugar Ann dwarf snap peas and some snow peas. I hope we win the competition with the voles!

Another sign of spring has been our first harvest of garlic scallions. They were a little bit shorter than usual for the time of year, but the psychological boost of harvesting a new crop made me do it! They are only a fraction of the size of these lush ones from a few years ago. usually we harvest them from early March to early May. We have lots, and a little goes a long way, so it will be OK to be harvesting them small at first. Garlic scallions are a treat! So easy to grow, and ready so early in spring, when there isn’t much else apart from stored roots and tubers and leafy greens. (Mind you, we are having delicious and beautiful salads, so I’m not disparaging leafy greens!)

A healthy patch of garlic scallions in spring Photo credit Kathryn Simmons
A healthy patch of garlic scallions in spring
Photo credit Kathryn Simmons

How to grow Garlic Scallions:

All you need is a small space that’s close to where you walk in spring. In the fall, as you prepare your garlic cloves for planting, set aside the tiny cloves. They wouldn’t grow good big bulbs anyway, so you’ll want to sort them out. After you finish your main planting, take your tiny cloves to your early spring-accessible piece of garden, make a series of furrows as close together as they go, tumble in the tiny cloves, any which way they fall, close together, shoulder-to-shoulder. Cover over with soil, then mulch with straw, hay or tree leaves. When they are 5″ or more tall, start harvesting. You can pull them up, trim the roots, peel off one outer leaf, then bunch. Or if you don’t have many, you do have a long spring, and you’d trade a longer wait for multiple harvests, wait till they are 10″ tall and cut the greens. They will regrow for repeat cutting. Garlic scallions are great for stir-fries, soups, pesto, omelets, salad dressings. . .

Goodbye winter, hello summer!

Rhubarb season is almost here. Credit Kathryn Simmons
Rhubarb season is almost here.
Credit Kathryn Simmons

Spring in Virginia is so variable in temperature! But this year is more so than usual. We’ve just had three days with high temperatures of 90F (31C) or more. Not so long ago we had night-time lows of 20F (-6.5C). Late February and all of March was full of snow and rain.

The only thing we managed to plant in the garden for the whole of March was a small amount of shallot bulbs. We’ve been doing an impressive amount of scrambling in the first ten days of April, to make up for lost time. Some crops we had to cut back on, because it got too late to plant. We only have a quarter of the onions we planned, half of the peas, a fifth of the spinach, and no fava beans this year. I realize it would be useful to have “last worthwhile planting dates” for all our spring crops, to help decision-making.

To add insult to injury, a Beast ate half of our early broccoli transplants in the cold-frame one night. Because there were big surface tunnels, I think it was Eastern Moles. They are insectivorous, not vegetarian, but they do use leaves to line their nests, which they make at this time of year. I bought a trap – no luck. I covered the remaining broccoli and lettuce flats as best I could with rat wire “lids” and clear plastic domed food covers – things I had handy from previous depredations. What seems to have worked is to line the coldframes with landscape fabric and set the flats on that, tightly up against the edges, leaving no wiggle room. Wisely, we do a later, third, sowing of broccoli to cover emergencies, so we spotted those out into bigger flats. We’re going to need them this year.

Chitting seed potatoes ready for planting. Credit Kati Folger
Chitting seed potatoes ready for planting.
Credit Kati Falger
Newly emerging potato plant in the spring Credit Kathryn Simmons
Newly emerging potato plant in the spring
Credit Kathryn Simmons

We have at last got our potatoes in the ground, three weeks later than ideal. On the positive side, they had been chitting (green-sprouting) in crates under lights in the basement since the beginning of March, so I could console myself that they were growing anyway. And probably they will come up quicker in the (suddenly!) warmer soil. We cut them for planting once the area was disked for planting and we were pretty sure we could get them in the ground in a few days.

We’ve busily transplanted spinach, kale, lettuce and scallions, and sowed carrots, more scallions and the third bed of beets. We used the Earthway seeder for the beets, and found the radish plate worked better than the beet plate for Cylindra seed, which were smaller than the Detroit Dark Red. We also tried the popcorn plate with some success, when the beet plate jammed.

We flamed one of our first two beds of beets, to kill the weeds that didn’t die properly with our hasty delayed rototilling. We would have flamed both, but the Cylindra popped up overnight earlier than I expected (going by soil temperature), so we’ll have to hoe those really soon, maybe this afternoon.

Spring bed of cabbages planted into rolled hay mulch. Credit Kathryn Simmons
Spring bed of cabbages planted into rolled hay mulch.
Credit Kathryn Simmons

Next we’ll be prepping our cabbage and broccoli beds. We make temporary raised beds, roll out round hay bales over them, then transplant into the mulch. We do this by first measuring and making “nests”, using our hands to open up the mulch down to the soil. The brassicas appreciate the mulch to moderate the soil temperature and keep some moisture in the soil.

Our big weeding projects have been the raspberries and the garlic.(Goodbye, henbit!)

 

Mar 2013 Growing for Market
Mar 2013 Growing for Market

Today we might sow our parsnips. I just wrote an article about them in the March issue of  Growing for Market. This issue also contains articles about increasing hoophouse tomato production, adding solar panels, equipment for tracking the weather, food safety and new interesting cut flowers.

Florence bulb fennel. Credit Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Florence bulb fennel.
Credit Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

The April issue is also out. For that, I wrote about fennel – bulbs, leaves, seeds and pollen. Other articles include one about Johnny’s Salanova lettuce, others about training cucumbers and tomatoes up strings in the hoophouse, a tractor implement for rolling out round hay bales (which is only fun to do by hand the first ten times, max), more on food safety, and an interview/field trip to Texas Specialty Cut Flowers. 

GFM-April 2013-cover-300px

Twin Oaks January Calendar – Starting a new garden season

A flat of newly emerged lettuce seedlingsPhoto Kathryn Simmons
A flat of newly emerged lettuce seedlings
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Yes, really! On January 17, I sowed flats of cabbage, lettuce and mini-onions (cipollini), and the cabbage and lettuce are already up. Onions usually take 10 days, so I’m not surprised not to see them yet. It’s fun to see new seedlings, even though my energy isn’t ready for taking on another growing season yet. I’m still enjoying hibernation!

The cabbage varieties are Early Jersey Wakefield, a quick-growing small pointy-head open-pollinated variety, and Faroa, a quick-growing fairly small round hybrid that has been very reliable for us. These are for a bed of early cabbage, to eat after our stored winter cabbage is all gone. We’ll sow our main-crop cabbage on 2/7, in much bigger quantities.

I sowed two lettuces: reliable old Salad Bowl and the unusual Cracoviensis, a pink veined sturdy leaf lettuce, that we have found is only useful for us at this first sowing. It bolts too easily once it gets even faintly warm. It tends not to get bitter even when bolting, but our diners aren’t going to believe that!

We’re also still busy with various stages of our garden planning. yesterday I updated our harvest calendar, which tells our cooks which crops they can expect when, and also our food processing calendar to tell the food processing crew when to be ready to tackle large amounts of broccoli, beans or paste tomatoes, for example. I’m part way through revising the document we call our garden calendar, which is really a month-by-month task list. If you were following this blog in the fall, you’ll remember some of those monthly garden task lists. We’ve planned which crops are going in which of the 60 permanent raised beds and identified the ones we need to spread compost on and till first. And then we twiddle our thumbs – lots of rain last week (and a bit of snow) mean it will be a couple more weeks before the soil is dry enough to till.

Here’s our short Twin Oaks Garden Task List for January:

Planning: Prune the catalogs, do the filing, consolidate notes on varieties and quantities.

Week 1: Finalize seed orders, if not done in December. Revise Seedling Schedule using seed order.

Week 2

    : Revise Outdoor Planting Schedule. Plan labor needs for the year.

Week 3

    : Revise Raised Bed Planning Chart. Plan raised beds for Feb-June.

Week 4:           Revise Garden Calendar, Lettuce List and lettuce Log.

Order Bt, spinosad and predatory beasties, coir. [sweet potato slips for shipping 5/12-5/17 if not growing our own]
Repair greenhouse and coldframes and tidy. Check germinator-fridge and heat mat. Repair flats, and make new if needed. Make stakes. Clean labels. 

Check equipment: rototiller, discs, and mower – repair or replace as needed.  Repair and sharpen tools.

Freeze out greenhouse to kill pests, or spray with soap or cinnamon oil every five days.  Import ladybugs.
Check potatoes, sweet potatoes and squash in storage.

Mid-Jan: In greenhouse sow lettuce #1, early cabbage, mini-onions, early broccoli, onions.

Late Jan: In greenhouse sow lettuce #2, scallions #1, spinach, tomatoes, peppers for hoophouse
Plant small potato onions, 4-5″ apart, ½-1” deep, in a mild spell. Remove mulch to plant, then replace it. Plant shallots & mulch.

Perennials (see November list). Weed blueberries, raspberries, asparagus (spread compost), grapes, rhubarb, strawberries.  Add soil amendments, fertilize (not strawberries) and mulch. Prune blueberries, (take cuttings if wanted). Fall raspberries: cut all canes to the ground, remove canes from aisles. Summer raspberries: remove old fruiting canes & canes from aisles.

Harvest: (Chard?), collards, kale, (senposai?) spinach, leeks, (Yukina Savoy?).

Our freshly mulched asparagus patch.Photo Kathryn Simmons
Our freshly mulched asparagus patch.
Photo Kathryn Simmons