Today I started pumpkins, winter squash, tomatoes, dill and basil

Another long day working in the garden today. After doing a bunch of work in the lot today, I spent an hour or so seeding some things indoors. I do not have a good indoor growing situation since we're doing some serious remodeling to the house, so Dan has been growing my tomatoes for me. I wanted to do a few things myself, mostly because I can squeeze in about one window's worth of flats.



Today I planted a six-pack of "Big Max" pumpkins. These aren't "Dill's Atlantic Giant", the one that all the gigantic-size record-holders use. But the package says it "regularly produces 250 pound giants." Sounds big enough to me. I also planted two six-packs of delicata winter squash, as well as some dill and three types of basil. I also planted precisely 24 seeds of Sunsugar hybrid tomatoes. I payed about $3 for 24 seeds, so I expect 100 percent germination, incredible growth, lots of fruit that easily ripen, and incredible flavor. The basil and delicata are for the CSA, the rest is just for me.

Today I planted taters and peas

You may be wondering when I'm going to stop planting peas, and well, today is the last. I've got a total of five beds planted with peas, for about 225 row-feet of peas total. A couple days ago, Lily told me that "very soon", she's not going to come into the kitchen between breakfast and dinner when she's hungry. She's been eating a lot of pea shoots so far, and being kind in her grazing, so I think we'll have enough for her appetite and some freezing.



The big job today was planting the taters that I've had resting in my garage for a couple weeks. I have three varieties: a red-skinned mid-season, the classic Yukon Gold, and some French fingerlings.



Dan gave me his opinion about bed prep, so I first dug a deep trench in each row. My rows are about 18" apart (center-to-center), and I tossed the dirt to the sides. Then Lily came through and dropped the chitted taters in equal spacing. If that's not a great garden job for a 5 year old, I don't know what is.



When they were all properly spaced, I tossed a bit of fertilizer and some dirt back on top. As the season progresses, I'll regularly scrape the hilled dirt onto the growing tater plant. You want nice, loose soil surrounding the roots, and since taters only grow above the seed tater you planted, the easiest thing to do is encourage the formation of the roots above-ground.

The rest of the garden is looking so spring-y, I decided to snap some pics of how various crops are growing. Here are some mustards (purple) and raab (green):



The beets are looking healthy:



I'll be thinning these lettuces into a salad later this week:



And here are some just-sprouted lettuces, which are the second succession planting:



Plenty of radishes for even the most radish-happy people:



And some yummy spinach, which didn't germinate terribly well, but is growing like gangbusters now:



Oh and the microgreens are all sprouting now. We'll harvest them in about two more weeks:

Today I planted micro greens, lettuce, carrots, radish, cilantro, parsely, joi choi and spinach

I spent a marathon day in the garden today. Well, marathon for me so far, but I bet I'll spend another few long days in the garden before this is all done.



Dan came over this morning and we started by tilling some beds. He tilled his half, which had some long grass starting to come up, and I tilled a few of my beds that didn't have anything growing in them (yet). I took the chance to destroy most of the grape hyacinths. I don't expect they'll come back up for a while.



Then we carefully screened a long bed and planted it with a mix of spring/micro greens. We tightly seeded chard, spinach, mustards, arugula, carrots and green onions and will be selling this harvest in about two or three weeks. Our plan is to do some experimenting with this bed, trying to sell baby greens throughout the season to local restaurants and at farmers markets. Most "micro greens" consist of these and other varieties, but instead of being grown in the ground, they're grown in flats with special soil. We're seeing if we can grow a comparable product with less investment. The goal is to sell tiny little greens, with a variety of colors, textures and tastes, used for super-fresh salads and garnishes. If they grow big, then they turn into "braising mix", which is generally cooked, being too tough and spicy to eat raw.



While we were doing all this work, Lily stayed busy eating pea shoots and throwing rocks. I told her it's okay to eat only one leaf from the very tallest plants - I hope any stunting will be minor. Then again, we do have 5 beds of peas - far and away the most of any crop.

Finally, I planted the first radishes of the season (I'll be planting them once a month), some more spinach (the batch planted on March 22 look great), the one planting of joi choi, as well as cilantro and parsley. I also planted a little round carrot called parmex, as well as two kinds of purple carrots, which we really enjoyed last year. And finally, I planted four more rows of lettuce - butter, green leafy, red leafy and romaine, right next to the bed I planted identically on March 22. The succession planting begins!

Today I planted beets, chard and scallions

We have had a rash of very warm weather earlier this week, starting way back about a week ago. But unlike every other gardener in Portland, I haven't set foot into the garden. In fact, I've spent the last six days inside, doing a major kitchen remodel. This is tangentially related to the CSA because I really do need a better place to process the weekly veggie harvest, and this will make room for a really nice processing area.



Yesterday was rainy, but last night and all day today was dry, so I took the opportunity to do some direct seeding which I was scheduled to do during the week. I planted about 4 feet of scallions and beets, and a full bed of swiss chard. I also used the dry weather to hoe all the beds since the grass was coming up, but I carefully left the grape hyacinths growing all over the place. I had forgotten that there was a field of them last year in the same spot. They're not doing any harm, so they get to live a little while longer.



I also screened one full bed using 1/4-inch wire mesh on a wooden frame. Some of the beds are very rocky, which makes planting quite difficult, so having nice smooth dirt is a luxury. Eventually I'd like to screen all the beds down about 4 or 6 inches.



The seeds I planted about three weeks ago are coming along nicely. The mustards and spinach are in that super-cute seed leaves stage where they look like little butterflies. And the raab is tall and tasty (I had one little nibble - couldn't resist). And so are the peas (again, I couldn't resist). The carrots are pretty much not germinating across the board, but that's not too much of a surprise. I prepped the potatoes bed, which will get planted this week. I actually have them in hand now, so after I get some drywall mudding done in the kitchen, I'll find some time to plant the taters.

Everything's looking very green and Spring-y!

How to make a planting calendar (Part 2)

This is the second in a multi-part series on how I developed a comprehensive planting calendar. Read part one here.

How many beds?

In my last post in this series, I outlined how I picked my varieties and why I eventually realized that I needed a planting calendar. The next step was to organize all the various pieces of information for inclusion in the calendar.

Dan Bravin suggested that I use a simple spreadsheet (I chose Google Docs) and run the beds down the side (rows) and weeks along the top (columns). But in order to do that, I first had to do two things: Determine the number of beds I had, and determine the number of weeks I wanted to garden.

To determine the number of beds, I first had to prepare the beds, at least roughly. For sure that involved working the soil, but it also required that I pick a bed width. 24 inches? 30 inches? 32, 36, or 42, 48 inches? All of these are good choices depending on who you ask and what books you consult.



There is really no wrong answer, at least not until you try one width for a year and determine that you'd rather try another width. There are a few considerations though: the size of your equipment, the size of your body, the way you harvest and plant, row and plant spacing for specific crops, and the layout of the plot.

I had to take into consideration the fact that Dan's tiller (which I'll be using this year) has an 18-20 inch wide path. So multiples of 18-20 inches would be easier to till. That narrowed it down to one or two tiller passes. 18 inches is a pretty standard width for home-gardener tillers, but there are models for walk-behind tillers up to 36 inches.



As for body size, I'm about 6 feet tall. In the past, I've done 48 inch raised beds, but I can just barely straddle that far. Being able to hop over a row is very handy, but more important than cross-row traveling is the way you stand when hoeing and harvesting.

Anything wider than about 36 inches makes for hard hoeing because it's difficult to reach the middle of the bed while maintaining an upright posture. And when it comes harvest time, it's darn near impossible to collect zucchini that are hiding under vines and leaves in the very middle of a 48 inch-wide bed, which means you have to harvest from both sides of a bed, which takes a lot longer.

Two foot beds are really the easiest on your body, but given the same area as another garden using four foot beds, you lose almost 20 percent of your growing area. That's too high a price to pay for ease of growing on sub-acre plots.

Each crop needs different spacing than other crops. Cabbage and squash take up a lot of room whereas radishes take up very little. For those two crops, bed widths don't matter very much since you're going to make a single row of cabbages per bed whether you have 24 inch beds or 48 inch beds. But for crops like carrots, spring greens and tomatoes, you can be forced into particular row spacings by how big your beds are. For instance, with 48 inch wide beds, I can fit two indeterminate tomatoes in a single row. With less, I can only fit one row of tomatoes per bed. Likewise with spring greens: Mustards can get three tight rows on a 36 inch bed, but only two on a 24 inch bed.



The last thing to take into consideration is the layout of your plot. I was thankfully blessed with a single big rectangle of more-or-less identical dirt, with more-or-less the same amount of sun, so I didn't have to plan to grow greens in a shady spot while saving my full-sun beds for peppers and tomatoes. I do have to worry about that in my home garden though. For instance, I have one long bed along a fenceline that grows nothing but greens.

After all these considerations were taken into account, along with measurements for a few perimeter paths and 12 inch inter-row paths, I came up with 24 beds, each approximately 18 feet long, and 36 inches wide. I started my spreadsheet by putting 24 rows down the side, and numbering my beds in order.