Harvest Monday: First Arugula

Last week we had two delicious harvests from the garden: asparagus and arugula. We also completed a lot of infrastructure work on the expanded garden.

After cutting a small handful of asparagus from the garden on Monday, I took a short walk to check on two stands of wild asparagus we'd observed in prior years and marked on our Google Maps. One had already started to fern out, but another provided 6 large stalks to round out our dinner. One of the benefits of country living - lots of farm field ditches to forage from.

After a week of much-needed rain (right after we drug a sprinkler into the garden to water, of course), the greens in my patio garden are really starting to pop.

On Saturday I harvested arugula (clipping about every other plant for a row and a half to also serve as thinning out), which we mixed into a quinoa salad. My husband said, "Why don't people eat more arugula? This is delicious!" The arugula was direct seeded on April 10, so it was 42 days to the first harvest.

I have the rest of the month off of work to focus on garden prep (and other relaxing, less physical activities). On Thursday and Friday I finished moving a yard of wood chips from the back of my pickup truck to the garden paths, hilled some potatoes, did some weeding, and planted a few flowers and herbs.

Over the weekend my husband was available in the mornings to help, so we got much more done. We created 11 more 30" in-ground raised beds, bringing the total to 18 so far. We have two more left to do, probably Memorial Day weekend, but a portable greenhouse is currently in the way. Over the next week I'll be hauling more wood chips to mulch the paths, and getting these rows planted, trellis structures put up, etc. I'm hopeful this garden layout can serve us for many years, so spring prep will be a bit less intensive.

This post joins others celebrating Harvest Monday, hosted by Dave at Happy Acres.

Perhaps the Pandemic Will Prompt More Gardening

It's funny and also a little sad to look at my last post here, from May 2017. We worked our tails off and got those beds in, then spent a small fortune on what was supposed to be really high quality garden mix with a high percentage of compost to fill them. Then we had two main problems:

• It was just too wet down there. We never were able to fill in around the beds, and it basically became a mud pit. The beds wanted to start rotting almost immediately.
• Something was wrong with the garden mix, and it stunted almost everything planted in it. My guess is the compost in the mix was still "hot."

I did have a great upper garden that year, though. I covered the entire 800 square feet in black landscape fabric, and created holes in it to plant. I had bumper crops in both 2017 and 2018, although controlling the weeds up there is an ongoing challenge (that's why I went with garden fabric).

The garden in 2017 (June) making good use of plastic lawn fabric

Harvest from one September day in 2018

2017 was the beginning of a few years that threw us a lot of curveballs. In June 2017, my dad had serious surgery for an aneurysm. He's fine, but he was in ICU for awhile. My father-in-law passed away in November 2017, very unexpectedly. A few months later we found out my mother-in-law had cancer, and she died in August 2018. This was of course a lot of personal stress, but things were also busy on the work front. In fall 2017 I started a business! It's kept me very busy, and now there are 11 people on my team.

Because of that, I was traveling a lot—close to 100 days a year in 2018 and 2019, with a lot of that travel during the growing season. After seeing how the garden was getting away from me in 2018, we made the conscious decision to take 2019 off from gardening. So we did. We also hired landscapers to rip out our back patio and build us a gorgeous new patio and fire pit, and at the last minute decided to have them rip out that nasty mud pit and the retaining well near it, instead sloping our lawn directly to the pond. While digging the base of the patio, they found a huge drainage problem and had to install a new drainage system... it's no wonder we had a mud pit down there.

Part of the new patio, with a slope right into the pond

I thought 2020 might be another no-garden year; travel didn't seem to be letting up and the business continues to grow. Then, in mid-March, travel stopped and I (along with my entire team) started working from home full-time. We'll be working like this until at least July 1, and likely some sort of hybrid home/office situation after that. All of my work-related travel has been cancelled until at least late September.

So why not garden? I didn't start any seeds, and most of my preferred suppliers were sold out when I checked their websites in March/April, so I gladly supported a local greenhouse to get tomato and pepper seedlings, along with a few others. I've started the process of "waking up" the upper garden, where I plan to plant some veggies I don't get a lot of in my CSA, as well as the food we love to preserve. I should have the time.

But once again, it's back-breaking work. It took me two weekends of intermittent work just to make sure I had the asparagus patch ready for it to appear this spring (it just started).

Asparagus bed, just before spears started popping up

I spent this afternoon and early evening in the garden as well. I pulled up all the landscape fabric, and I've been digging out some perennial weeds. I'll till within the next couple of days (when I get a dry day), and then I want to try creating some planting areas that rely more on mulch (newspaper + straw for large plants, shredded paper/straw for small), rather than messing around with the fabric over the entire garden. That gives me the flexibility to plant things like rutabaga and bush beans, which wouldn't have worked in my last setup. I still have some of the landscape fabric, so I'll probably use it for rows (and it will be easier to re-use that way).

Because I've been working so much and our summer vacation (and probably fall) is cancelled, I also have a lot of time off piled up. So I'll have 3 and 4 day weekends the next few weeks to get the garden going, and entire weeks off (or days available for impromptu time) when the harvest and food preservation needs are greatest. Even if I'm sore for days, being in the garden makes me happy and allows me to forget everything else that's going on in the world. I'm glad I can focus on it this year.

A Very Muddy Work Day

What happens when you have just one day set aside to rent a sod cutter to get ready for your raised beds, and it rains for days and days before that? Lucky for me, I now have this experience and can answer the question.

1. The sod cutter wheels get caked with mud and fail to grip, so it requires some man-handling.
2. The sod is much, much heavier than it would be if given a few days to try out.
3. Carrying the sod to its resting place for composting turns your husband into Mud Man.

I just pulled these clothes out of the dryer. They're amazingly clean.

We stripped the sod from a roughly 65' x 6' area. I have an in-progress picture, but won't get another one until we dig out the bits that refused to be cut and it dries up a bit. Currently, we've just created a mud pit. It rained all day the day after we did this.

The bed on the right up against the retaining wall is home to about a half dozen raspberry plants, and a lot of weeds. We used some of the cut sod to smother the weeds and mulch the bed. The area in the middle will soon be home to eight 6' x 3' raised beds.

The upper garden is much further along. On April 23 I completed the prep and planting of the bed along the fence. What was once a forest of weeds and unwanted landscaping plants is now home to 50+ garlic plants, 200 onion plants, and 21 asparagus crowns.

Last week we had a landscaping crew on our property for two days, working to clean out the overgrowth and weeds around the property. Part of what they did for me was clear out a roughly 800 square foot area that will become the main part of the upper garden. I got two areas planted on Saturday - the strawberry/rhubarb patch (24 ever-bearing strawberries; rhubarb was existing) and the pea patch. I planted two 7-foot rows of peas along both sides of the temporary fence, and around the two tripod structures I found on the property. There's still room for another row, so I think I'll plant radishes here on the next dry day if I can find some seeds in my stash.

I also spent a lot of time this weekend potting up plants. In fact, my phone just died because I was down in the basement so long listening to podcasts, so I don't have any pictures. I'll have to save those for next time!

Head on over to Our Happy Acres for Harvest Monday to see what other gardeners are harvesting, prepping, planting, or preserving!

Beans for Mother's Day

On Mother's Day, I planted the first of our beans—pole beans. This year I'm growing Purple Trionfino and Rattlesnake beans. I like these because they're purple, which makes them easy to pick. Every year that I've grown beans I've lost my trellis to severe thunderstorms, so this year I'm trying something different—bamboo teepees. Yup, I'm finally growing my pole beans on poles. The teepees have 6 poles each, and I planted 6 seeds per pole as the packet instructed. That sure seems like a lot of beans. Of course, less than 24 hours after planting a line of sever weather came marching through, and the teepees seem to be taking it well. Once it stops raining and it's a little less soggy outside, I'll plant the next round of beans—favas (first time growing those).

Yesterday I also transplanted four heads of red leaf lettuce, seeded three square feet of chard (4 seeds per foot), and planted nine square feet of beets (9 seeds per foot). I potted up about half of the pepper seedlings, and will do the rest later this week. The biggest task was to move a bunch of woodchips from the back of our lot line (where the landscaper got a little overzealous and encroached on our neighbor's lot) to the front of the garden to give the hedge some growing room. My job was easy—lay down newspaper 20" from the hedge line. Aaron actually hauled all the woodchips from back to front. He did an excellent job.

On Thursday, my father-in-law delivered the new arbor and gate he made for us. Isn't it gorgeous?

The gate (not pictured) will be attached to two 4 x 4's that need to be dug into the ground. They'll attach directly to the front of the gate. This year, I'm planning to grow Morning Glories up and over the arbor (I got some seeds for free with a Seed Savers order). Next year, perhaps beans, malabar spinach, or even some squash or melons. Once those posts are in the ground, nothing will pull this over.

Since I'm linking this to Daphne's Harvest Monday post, I should talk about what I harvested.

See that fresh basil on top of the chicken parmesan? I harvested the tops of three seedlings so I could garnish the dinner I made for me and my parents. It was a useful harvest, not just because it was DELICIOUS, but because I normally pick the top off the basil early to encourage it to branch out and form additional stems. For the record, the sauce was homemade, but from a local farmer's tomatoes because I didn't have a garden last year.

First Day in the 2012 Garden

There isn't a whole lot going on in the backyard in March, but with the highs consistently in the 70's for a few weeks (what, global warming?) we had to get out into the garden to do some work. Here's how the garden looked before we started to wake it up from its winter nap yesterday.

The garlic, however, seems to have woken up on its own just fine. This is great, as it's the first year I've planted garlic and I was concerned that I hadn't planted it in optimal soil conditions.

The day's work included weeding one of the garden beds. Grass seems to find its way from the paths to the beds constantly. We've got a project underway to take care of that, but that's for another blog post, when we're hopefully much further along.

After weeding what I could see, I removed our winter "comforter compost" (just a covering of last fall's yard waste) from half the bed and found some more grass and weeds. After quickly taking care of them, it was off to find the compost.

We have a compost pile against the fence at the back of our garden, but I haven't been very good about turning it and I don't currently have a screen to sift it. So, much of this year's compost will be purchased. I covered a 4' x 8' section of one bed with three 3/4 cubic yard bags of composted manure. I didn't even mix it in; just arranged it on top. Over time, the rain will seep through and mix the compost into the soil. Also, the soil is still a little wet, so the inch or so layer of compost gives me some soft ground to plant in.

Speaking of planting, I decided I couldn't waste this great weather and had to experiment by planting some of my cool-weather crops, which I normally wouldn't plant for another month. This year I'm using the square foot gardening method for most of my beds. Last year I planted in rows, and I felt like I wasted a ton of space. Since I'm new to this, I wanted a physical reminder of what a square foot looks like. I got out some twine and a staple gun and created a square foot grid.

The grid only covers 8' of the 16' bed, as I didn't need to plant the other portion yet and I wanted to leave the comforter compost to do its work.

With the grid laid out, I planted:

• Knight Peas (2 squares of 16)
• Sugar Lace Peas (2 squares of 16)
• Toppers Turnips (1 square of 9)
• Tokyo Cross Turnips (1 square of 9)
• Cherry Belle Radishes (1 square of 16)
• Easter Egg Radishes (1 square of 16)
• French Breakfast Radishes (1 square of 16)
• Boltardy Beets (1 square of 16)
• Early Wonder Beets (1 square of 16)
• Crosby Egyptian Beets (1 square of 16)
• Pine Tree Lettuce Mix (2 squares of 4)
• Arugula (2 squares of 9)
• Dash Spinach (1 square of 9)

If all goes well, I'll be eating from the garden in mid-April. Considering I don't have any winter plantings, that's a Wisconsin miracle!

The other garden news is we have a new acquisition: a heavy-duty garden cart. We found this little baby on sale at Lowe's for $50. Great deal, and a great way to haul stuff around the garden and avoid extra trips to the garage.