Harvest Monday - May 30, 2016

Another week of nice weather and the harvests are picking up.

The overwintered spinach was starting to bolt, so it was all harvested & the plants were pulled:

Giant Winter Viroflex Spinach
 

Greens

Right on the tail of getting the first harvest of the season is the start of the greens parade.  This is the much anticipated point in time when the greens trickle picks up the pace and you can start to walk PAST that section of the grocery store with a bit of extra pep in your step and mumble under your breath "see you in November..." :)

Our recent spurt of warm weather has put the garden in high gear - and it's about time.  Remember the bed that is planted up with quick growing crops that need to get pulled by next week so that the tomatoes can go in?  What a difference a week can make:


Bed #12 on May 19

Bed #12 on May 25

Harvest Monday - May 23, 2016

Each year I think that my first harvest will be earlier than last year - and each time I don't get that 1st harvest until the May long weekend.

With our very late spring, I actually feel lucky that I'm harvesting anything at all as the spring sown crops, including lettuce, spinach and rapini, all crops that I've harvested in the past at this time, are still babies.  But what finally put on some growth was a veg I had sown in the fall with the hopes that it would overwinter to give me an extra early harvest.  Giant Winter Virolflex Spinach.

Giant Winter Viroflex Spinach

A (not so) brief garden update....

It’s been a busy couple of weeks both in the garden and out and I’m long overdue for an update.

To start, we have the straw bales which, unlike last year, I’m conditioning this time.  I picked up 5 new bales about a month ago but am also going to try re-using the ones from last year.  The old bales are still holding together pretty well, likely because they didn’t really get going until the 2nd half of the summer.  To help them stay upright, I sank some u-posts around the bales and wrapped them with chicken wire.  I decided to do the same with the new bales to see if I can get 2 seasons out of them instead of one.

New Bales

Aaaand.....we're back!

You may have noticed that I was conspicuously absent for the past couple of weeks.  Well, once again, my husband wanted to get away in April – didn’t I say last year that we would never go away during one of the busiest times of the season?  It could have been worse, I suppose, had we gone a couple of weeks later when transplants were bursting out of their pots, needing to get into the ground, and I wasn't around to take precautions should a late frost be predicted.

Now take a wild guess where we went…