Gardening From Scratch

Spring Cleaning

strawberry 057 — Raised strawberry bed after winter

Spring cleaning in the garden is always amazing to me. Plants that are looking so totally dead, are really not. I am so grateful for the softer soil and the milder (cooler) temperatures as we work. You can grab a whole handful of weed and pull it fully out (roots and all) from the soft cool soil. We remove all of the dead, pulling weeds as much as possible as we go through the whole garden. Clearing so can start to sprout up and blossom again.

strawberry 058 — Using hands and shears I cut all of the dead out.

Cleanup begins with all the fruit trees done in the winter. Now it is the berries then on to the herbal tea garden, herbs, spices, and everything else. see all the dead hanging out on the sides of the raised strawberry bed.

strawberry 059 — All the debris is on the outside on the ground.

Big piles of weeds are easily piled up and burned in the middle of the garden. The ash is worked back into the soil with the tractor disc and rototilling, which is the next step. Ash is one of God’s fertilizers. All stalks and dead are burned.

mints Spring — Mint tea plants after winter

EXCEPT FOR THE MINT!, they are simply burned outside of the garden or else they will be growing everywhere. I only have to miss a single leaf and a new mint plant begins., SUNFLOWERS too, don’t go there with me, that takes a couple of pages of words even to begin to describe.

All year long I approach garden chores on a first come first needed basis. Like, the asparagus is the first crop so it gets cleared first. It is the only way I can keep from going crazy trying to keep up.

Asparagus Comes

asparagus patch after winter I love when the asparagus comes each year. Here is what our asparagus patch looked like just as winter melted away this year. See all the dead lying on top of each row? It looks like a zombie garden, but, there are some real treasures getting ready to spring up as soon as it warms up a little. I raked all the dead off the top just after the snow melted which was about 2 weeks ago.

asparagus 040 Our patch is finally had enough time to actually grow up and produce reliably for us. It is a total of seven 25-foot rows that were started in 2018 and increased in size from saved seed. Don’t listen to people that say it is impossible to do. You don’t have to spend a million dollars to accomplish this. I bought 6 roots from North 40 Farm Supply for about $20 bucks and planted them. Then we collected seeds and saved them, planting more each year. It is about a 3-year job but well worth the work and patience required.

Who else loves asparagus?

Did you know which one of our early American Presidents loved asparagus? He loved it so much that he grew a lot of it in his Monticello gardens. Have you already guessed? Well, it was Thomas Jefferson who evidently was quite a gardener himself. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Here is a recipe of his for marinated asparagus, that is really good.

first harvest of asparagus Every other day I pick about 10 pounds of delicious vegetables. This is a picture of the first harvest with some long and some short. All sizes are delicious and also very good for you.

Seed Starting in INW

Inland North West Seed Starting

Our seed starting methods changed for us this year. We got clear food-grade tall containers to transplant into that allow more room for roots to flourish. Since we do not have a really long growing season, we have to start seed early, in order to be able to harvest before frost hits.

Plant Starts 01 Usually, we put plants on every window sill in the house and run around watering and turning them. There becomes a real problem with the limited widths of the sill and the windows being actually a little chilly. But, when we built our place we did install in-floor heating and loved it. This year we placed trays on our heated floors in the basement and put grow lights suspended over them. We water from the bottom and use our favorite potting soil (Black Gold).

Doing it this way gives us enough room to plant more and include plants needed for where we volunteer at the at the Pantry Garden, and Garden Fest.

It took an investment in LED grow lights purchased from Home Depot,

4 ft. 54-Watt Vertical White LED 3 Adjustable Spectrum Linkable Plant Grow Light Fixture White Adjustable Light

and building a temporary structure to hold them from materials lying around. The increased healthy growth in all the plants seems well worth it. Plus, all of it is reusable for many years.

After the plants get a good start we then take turns spending evening hours transplanting them to bigger containers so the roots have room. It is so much nicer to be able to open windows without worrying about spillage and clean up and have our windows back.

With such solid plants started we are really looking forward to putting in a productive garden this year.

Planting Broccoli

broccoli plant starts A friend of mine is planting broccoli and was asking, “How far apart?” on FaceBook.

mature broccoli Well here are some pictures of the broccoli in our garden last year. You can see that they do tend to get to be quite large. That doesn’t bother us though, we put them in a row and harvest by going up and down both sides of the row.

broccoli Waltham 29 seed Honestly, I cheat by scanning the seed packet of anything that we plant. It helps to be able to look up info about whatever we are growing because my head doesn’t store this information very well. broccoli Di Cicco seed

Some people use markers in the garden for all kinds of information. But, I have had to limit the markers to just tell me what I plant in each row. The markers in the garden stand a good chance of being broken, lost, or unreadable so I rely on them to help till I can see what the plants are. broccoli Calabrese seed

Add this ingredient to your repertoire if you are planting any of the “APHID” crops:

Diatomaceous Earth Food Grade

This #50 bag of white powder will make you very happy because it stops those little buggers when they come to eat all of your cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, etc, etc, etc.