In many area gardens, beds of early beets, carrots, turnips and garlic bulbs will be harvested between now and early August, challenging us to choose short-season and frost-hardy varieties for continuous planting.
Rows of vigorous fall-planted garlic have anchored the garden with their lush foliage, superseded only by perennial rhubarb that thrived even when its leaves were snow-covered on May 12.
The rain, the sight of the Sun at the top of the sky, the quickened greening of the earth and the press of crops ready for harvest pull us into the rising tide of the growing season.
At the end of a day flying under cerulean sky above a sheet of clouds and traversing airports, my eyes exchanged the densely wooded, rounded hills of the northeast for Albuquerque, New Mexico’s fantastical Sandia Mountains.
As you prepare for succession planting and look ahead to new growing spaces, please consider that creating and maintaining permanent planting beds is the starting point for recognizing soil as an ecosystem of micro- and macro-organisms.
We are fundamentally light farmers. Harvest as much sunlight energy as possible by having as much green leaf as possible — therefore as much of the year as possible.
A gardener can simply collect seeds, sow them the next year and see what comes up, but a little understanding of the process can greatly impact the results.
May 11 through 24, 2015
Mt. Washington -- With the sudden onset of unseasonably hot weather, the vegetable gardener is in a tailspin. We’ve gotten...
