Not much more explanation needed: the pictures capture all the little growings on happening. But I will say that I especially loved the strawberry. Nothing like the first strawberry of the season.
The past couple of weeks have been excellent for my garden full of green plants. Things are growing so well, and I've been doing better about actually harvesting and eating them - not letting them stay in the garden thinking of that magical "someday" I want to save them for. Gardening is really ripe with life metaphors. See what I did there? Not much more explanation needed: the pictures capture all the little growings on happening. But I will say that I especially loved the strawberry. Nothing like the first strawberry of the season. ...lettuce ...kale ...rainbow chard ...nasturtiums ...soup peas ...dill ...white pea flowers ...purple pea flower ...strawberry :) ...beets ...my 4 x 8 piece of heaven.
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Happy Friday! IVe been traveling this week so I haven't had much time to post. Today I wanted to share a few photos from our community garden work day last weekend. My family came to help out and it was so special working in the garden with them! Check out the before and after photos - I was amazed at how much we accomplished in just a few hours. Hope you all have a fantastic weekend!
I came back from vacation to an explosion of baby lettuce! My six varieties of lettuce all seem to be doing pretty well. I should be able to start harvesting (and eating!) fresh, delicious salads in a week or two. Above is the Freckles lettuce and below are the Buttercrunch and the Merlot variety. In the picture above you can also see a random baby cilantro that popped up (top center) and one of my radishes (bottom left) that aren't doing so hot. I tried harvesting radish seeds last season, but the seeds I planted at the end of April haven't been very productive. I might try them again at the end of the season. Some baby rainbow chard that will need to be thinned out soon. And some peas that I am so excited about!! These are the blue shelled peas I bought through Baker Creek seed company. I love the slightly blue tinge to the leaves and the small purple circles where the leaves meet the stems. Watching things grow and finding new details like this is one of my favorite parts of gardening. Things are also going well in the herb garden. The chamomile is going crazy, which means I'll soon have to research when to harvest it and how to turn it into delicious tea. Sounds like a good potential blog post... These are the borage seedlings I started from seed a few weeks ago. It's the first time I've planted it, and I'm curious to see how it grows. When it's mature it will grow light blue flowers that supposedly taste like cucumbers. And the sage is also growing nicely! I am so glad it survived the winter. You can see the progress it's made in just a few short weeks.
This week we have another garden work day, and I'm planning to plant my nasturtium and bean seeds and do some work in our food forest. My family is also visiting from St. Louis, and my mom promised to bring some tomato plants for my community garden plot! The weather looks like it's going to be perfect, and I am so happy to spend time outside and have a picnic lunch. Hope you have a great weekend. Have any fun plans? I've mentioned that this season I'll be tending a plot at the community garden I direct and also trying to create an urban garden on our porch deck. Today I have a few photos of our community garden to share with you! I planted a lot of seeds in the bed about three weeks ago, and with the cold crummy weather we've been having the plants are just now starting to emerge. So far I have peas and... Yay for lettuce! I planted six varieties this year (and the only names I remember right now are Merlot and Freckles). I am obsessed with the delicious, fresh taste of garden lettuce. Pretty soon I'll be swimming in it! I also have some radishes popping up. Like I've said before, I don't love radishes, but I love having something to harvest from the garden early in the season. And radishes bit the bill! Elsewhere at the community garden, the strawberry plants that we transplanted look like they're doing very well. I think we should get some strawberries from them pretty soon! Assuming the squirrels don't eat them all first. The cold frames we built a few weeks ago are being put to good use! I wish I could claim credit for any part of this project or these plants, but alas, I cannot. My friend built these frames from scratch and grew these gorgeous plants from seed. He's pretty amazing. His secret is a seed heating pad (that I'm borrowing now for my babies) and a good grow light system. I'm hoping to copy his methods next season since my seed starting efforts were not nearly as successful. One helpful way to use a cold frame is to harden off plants you've started from seeds. Since they're only accustomed to indoor conditions, baby plants grown from seed need to slowly acclimate to outdoor weather and sunlight. Propping the cold frame open a bit can help regulate the cold frame temperature so the little babies don't get overheated! One of the biggest community garden projects this season is getting our food forest area back under control. We spent a lot of time planting edible plants on the far side of this space two seasons ago, and now the area has been almost entirely taken over by bindweed and thistle. There was a large space that we had not planted yet but had begun prepping for more edibles, and the bindweed basically used this area as a vaccuum for explosive growth. We tried pulling it out, but it just kept coming back!! Then we saw photos of its 20 foot deep root system and knew we had to take extreme measures. After lots of research and discussion, we decided to tarp the whole area the weed-that-must-not-be-named had taken over. We'll cover it with mulch and focus our efforts on pulling the b-weed on the perifery of the area. Crossing our fingers that this will help us beautify this area! Thanks so much for reading! For more community garden posts, read here.
This past Saturday marked the beginning of this year's community garden season. As the community garden director, I was responsible for organizing and directing the work day, and I am happy to report it was a success! I had been nervous about the turn out since our weather in Wisconsin has been so crummy. Luckily we had a sunny (but cold) day and a great group of hardworking gardeners helping to get our garden ready for growing! After the snow melted, we assessed which beds need repairs and identify our priorities for the season. Our beds just needed a few minor repairs, and we were able to spend the majority of our work day pulling weeds and topping off our beds with fresh, organic soil. We splurged this year on "activiated" soil, essentially fancy compost designed to add nutrients to gardens. As any good gardener knows, good gardening starts with good soil. The herb circle we built last year is still looking great, and I was happy to see a few perrenials made it through the winter! The sage and parsley will be making another appearance this season and the chamomile reseeded itself! Baby chamomile! I see some tasty tea in my future! They're alive! I'm realizing as I type this that I forgot to pick some sage and thyme to use in my home cooking. I harvested a lot of herbs from our herb circle at the end of last garden season, and the edible herbs made my winter dishes extra tasty, but now they're all used up! Time to get pick some fresh stuff. Last season we set aside a few beds to be educational and learning spaces. This season, one of our educational garden beds will be dedicated to growing strawberries and edible flowers. I like to have communal spaces like these that educate people about all the possibilities of gardening. Most people feel like they're undertaking a lot just trying to grow the basics like tomatoes, so seeing other people grow new things is helpful. I gave edible flowers a try last year in the garden, and this season I can't wait to grow them again! Hopefully this communal space will give gardeners some ideas for next season. I was so impressed with all the work we accomplished Saturday. It's so fun to see everyone working hard together and the beautiful transformation of our garden. Just look at those gorgeous garden beds! In addition to prepping our garden beds, we also added two cold frames to our garden. One of our garden committee members built these himself. I was beyond impressed. He bought the supplies, measured and cut the cedar, then assembled everything at the work day (the plastic film covering was added after I took these pictures). We are so lucky to have such talented people working hard to make our garden a beautiful place. These cold frames will help us extend our garden season and provide a space for baby transplants needing to adjust to outside conditions. Getting my hands in the dirt felt so amazing. If you've experienced a winter up north, you understand the tremendous joy that comes from finally reaching spring after months of being frozen solid. It gets to the point that you start to forget what it was ever like to see living things outside. I was joking with some gardeners on Saturday that spring starts to literally feel like being reborn. Being in the garden made the end of winter finally feel real - we've almost made it to the days of nice weather and seeing living things outside again. Thank God! This is my happy place.
In a few months this area will look completely different. It's so hard to image now, but in a few months we'll (hopefully) have more veggies than we know what to do with. I. Can't. Wait. a successful kick off to our 2014 community garden season
getting my hands dirty in fresh organic soil seeing the garden transform with the help of many hands sharing a meal with my fellow gardeners feeling sunshine on my face in Milwaukee for the first time in a long time having a whole day to relax around the house seeing buds and flowers blooming all over my neighborhood much warmer morning walks with the pups celebrating one year of having Diego as part of our family - love that beagle boy! Seed catalogs combine my loves of gardening and photography into bound pages of beauty. Usually I just flip through whatever old catalogs I have laying around my house, the ones that are several years old that I inherited from fellow gardeners. But I recently found a new favorite catalog produced by Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds calls the Whole Seed Catalog. I first saw the catalog on Pinterest, then heard about it again from a friend, then realized it was made by the same company that was responsible for an awesome gardening book I had checked out from library. Basically all signs in the universe were pointing me towards this seed catalog. I was so excited about this catalog I was willing to pay for it - and it was well worth the $7.95 cost. The catalog includes 350 pages of seeds and also features information about interesting farmers, seed saving tips, recipes, and quotes from people like my heroine Vandana Shiva. Ordering the catalog gave me the extra excitement of waiting for it to arrive in the mail, and I'll be able to have it on hand for seasons to come. (For those not on top of ordering your garden seeds yet: you can currently get the 2014 catalog for only $4! Quite the steal :) Seed catalogs are so exciting. They hold so much possibility and garden dreams. The Whole Seed Catalog has especially nice pictures, and like I said, the extra features add something special too. There were so many varities of vegetables, fruits, and flowers in the catalog that I had never even heard of. My favorite was the Michael Pollan green tomato. I decided I needed a lot of seeds this year and might have gone a little crazy with my Baker Creek seed purchases (unfortunately the Michael Pollan was sold out). But I know I'm supporting a good cause, and it'll help me have a beautiful vegetable garden this season. So thanks in advance Baker Creek for a tasty, beautiful, heirloom garden.
Okay folks, it's become abundantly clear that winter 2014 means business. Wisconsin is working on some kind of state record for most number of days with ridiculous temperatures, and today I woke up yet again to a zero degree morning. I know we've all been doing our best to thrive this winter (I've done 18/20 things from my list - still need to throw a party and nevery insulated the windows), but it's becoming harder and harder to stay upbeat with all this cold weather. Let's just be serious. This weather needs.to.go.now. But since it's not going to, I'm going to pretend like it's time to garden. This year my garden planning has started with a gusto in February. Usually it doesn't start until May when I'm leafing through my old seed packets the night before my first planting day. Imagining fresh herbs and fresh lettuce coming straight from the garden has given me a new burst of energy and has hopefully bought me a few more weeks of winter thriving. Though it's difficult to remember what it was even like to have a garden. Has it ever been warm enough for that? How are those flowers not dieing from a cold frost? These pictures must be from that alternate reality I used to live in where birds and bees flew around outside, and I could walk around without my nose freezing shut. The past two years, much of my gardening energy has gone into being the director of a community garden connected to my church. I started the garden with a friend - and the help of a garden committee and other volunteers - in 2012. We have twenty five 4 x 8' garden beds, an herb circle, a couple of educational beds, a donation garden, and an edible food "forest." I rent one of the plots and have gardened it by myself the past two seasons. Since I'll be living further from the garden this year (not just across the street anymore), I asked a few friends to share the plot with me. I'll also be splitting the garden director duties with a friend - SCORE! - which I am so happy about. Both of these developments are super exciting, and I think they should work out really well. In our 4 x 8' plot, we're planning to grow lettuce, tomatoes, beets, carrots, radishes, beans, cucumbers, kale, basil, and cilantro. We're hoping to do some succession planting throughout the season and possibly extend our season into November with the help of some cold frames. We'll be supplementing our harvest with the communty garden's herb circle, farmer's markets, and our community supported agriculture box. In addition to the community garden, my big labor of love this year will be transforming our front deck into an urban garden oasis. I have a vision in my head of it being absolutely gorgeous -with lots of great smells, colors, and tastes - with some twinkle lights thrown in of course. I've been super inspired by Gayla Trail, author of the blog You Grow Girl. She is a gardening master for the modern woman, has written some amazing gardening books, and has the ability to transform small spaces into gardening paradises. See below: I've never taken on a project quite like this before. I've learned to grow a season's worth of veggies in a 4 x 8' space, but I've never ventured into the realm of container gardening on a deck. Something about it makes me more nervous (probably the newness of it). The biggest challenge will be finding and arranging various size containers to make an interesting deck-garden design - and to find someone to water everything when we go out of town. Though I have a finished product vision in my head, I imagine it will probably evolve each season for as long as Paul and I are in our current apartment. Here's a not-so-great picture of our deck from last summer. It extends maybe ten feet off the front of our house then stretches across the whole front length of our house. The picture gives you a basic idea of what I'll be working with (beagles included). I'd like to have a variety of colors and textures and also plant veggies and herbs that I'd want to have quick, easy access to. So lettuce, oregano, basil, cilantro, mint, parsley, lavender, and sage are high on my list. I'd also like to have some colorful edibles like strawberries and nasturtiums. To add some height, I might add a tomato plant or a vine type plant like beans or peas. Reading Gayla's books has taught me that very few veggies are off limits when it comes to container gardening. The only limit is really my imagination - which is both exciting and scary.
I'll be stocking up on some seeds this weekend when I go to the Botanical Garden's annual orchid show with my mom, sister, and cousins. And then, if things go according to plan, I'll start growing some seeds inside in the next month or two. What would you like to grow this season? P.S. Have you ever signed up for a community supported agriculture box? This will be my fifth season doing it. See my post here for more information about it. When you find a CSA program that's a good fit for you it can be an excellent way to eat fresh veggies all summer long with the added benefit of supporting your local farmers and local economy! |