The spring garden is booming. The hot weather has hustled things along. Everyone is getting green cabbage this week. New in the full shares are fennel and beets and the Small Shares should get them next week. All of the lettuce is ready NOW. Lettuce is an impatient vegetable. It will not wait in the field until your earliest convenience. It will bolt. Bolting is when a vegetable that you don’t want to flower starts to send up a flower stalk prematurely. Flowering lettuces in the field are really quite lovely, they have a conical shape like miniature Christmas trees and the whole bed looks like a little fairy forest. But I digress. It is now a race to get things harvested at peak eating quality. Instead of asking myself “what is ready to harvest?” I am asking myself equally, “what can’t wait another week in the field?”
You might be wondering when the carrots will be ready, it should be early June. Hopefully we will have some squash and zucchini next week, otherwise it will be early June for those as well. June will also bring onions and a little later, potatoes. By the end of June we should be harvesting high tunnel tomatoes. They are in the tunnel that we finally got the plastic on last week. Just in time for more big rain that came just a few hours to early and kept us from getting our cover crops seeded!
Living Mulch Update
This year we are using buckwheat in the squash and okra pathways and teff grass in the tomato and winter squash pathways as an experiment in living mulch. I love using wheat straw mulch but it is always a challenge to get all that mulch spread in time to stop the weeds from germinating. It is a labor intensive job and tends not to be a “worker favorite”. Spreading seeds only takes a moment. As you can see from the pictures, the buckwheat is coming up well. And there is certainly grass in the teff grass pathways. How much of that is weeds like crab grass and goose grass, and how much is teff remains to be seen.
Small Shares
- Head Lettuce
- Salanova Lettuce Mix
- Farao Green Cabbage
- Rainbow Chard
- Hakurei Turnips
Full Shares
- Head Lettuce
- Salanova Lettuce Mix
- Farao Green Cabbage
- Red Russian Kale
- Beets
- Fennel
- Hakurei Turnips
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