Give me oil, give me vinegar
Two days of garden work:
Day 1 - May 3 - light rain, 59 degrees, Tom & Susan Phalen, Liz Neary, Camille, Caroline, Sal & Me
Day 2 - May 6 - mostly cloudy, 62 degrees, Shannon, Lisa, Karen, two interns, Sal & Me
We’re about a week away from a fine spring salad, featuring some of our greens - arugula, purple mizuna, and spicy mesclun (shown here). Add a few chives, possibly some lambs quarters (take careful note of the weeds you pull - some are edible and delicious), and voila!
Thanks to all the farm help we’ve had in these weeks running up to our big planting days, May 16-17.
We made some serious progress this week, to the point where the east half of the garden is largely finished and ready for planting:
- Weeding - Blackberries and Calendula row are now tamed, thanks to Liz and Susan. An all-day weeding session…
- Laying thermal plastic in squash section, nearly completing row mulching on east half of garden
- We removed the old plastic and laid new path fabric and straw
Limed the east half of the garden (lime changes the soil ph, as compost can raise the ph)*- Planted second planting of arugula, spicy mesclun, and wildfire lettuce
- Spray apples - organic
- row covered the rhubarb against bugs
Planted lemon verbena, sunflowers, and three rows of Adirondack Red and Blue potatoes
*actually it’s just because the farmer next door does it :)
This is our favorite time of the year to work in the garden…when there’s a lot of help. The garden looks so dead after a long winter, but this time of year, little things make it look a lot better. Seeing the verbena back in the garden (smells like a lemon grove),the rows starting to take shape, the garlic almost a foot high, raspberries to knee level, and delicious purple asparagus.
The next two weekends - May 9-10 and May 16-17 - are our two big ones.
We can use as many people as are available. E-mail me or Sally and let us know if you can make it up…we’ll put you to work.
The big focus for this weekend will be building an arbor and planting our new concord grapes, as well as a full row of strawberries. We also need to finish the corn rows, potatoes, get the irrigation down, trellis up the snap peas…do some early seed planting (carrots, cilantro).
The following weekend is when we’ll put in our plants, which have been doing very nicely thank you in our basement bilco door.
