The seasons are changing… (and swales are growing!)
It’s been cool for late May, and so for a few more weeks the Spring Garden and the Summer Garden are cohabiting, with our peas starting to set and our tomatoes firmly in the ground. We had a good showing this year with our greens and radishes, and although we haven’t gotten any peas yet, we’ve been enjoying the pea flowers for a week and the shoots have been nice additions to our salads.
Ever tried radish pods?
Last year we found out by accident that we really enjoyed eating radish pods, so we left a few plants to go to seed and we’re just seeing the radishes flower.
It’s been a good year for garden flowers so far - we let our cilantro go to bloom so that we can harvest the coriander and we left some radishes to bloom for radish pods.
In our large bed, our “cut-and-come-again” mix has put up some early buds for us to enjoy!
Coming soon, our summer hopes are resting on our recent transplants from the greenhouse: san marzano tomatoes, sweet bell peppers, long purple eggplants, a globe eggplant, an estanco chile, a hot chili pepper, large-leaf basil, parsley, and pickling cucumbers. Today we’re adding some direct seeding to the party, including long green beans, wax bush beans, Armenian cucumbers, summer squash, and Asian wing beans.
As a side project, Lina wanted to try a “three-sisters” dedicated bed with corn, lazy-wife beans, and blue hubbard squash!
Three-sisters bed
Lina made a hybrid hugelbed/raised bed with some logs at the bottom, large logs building the sized, and the the rest of the bed filled with a mix of soil, composted woodchips, and finished compost. The corn is planted in rows with the beans on the outside. There are some blue hubbard squash plants seeded on either end. It’s a modification of the traditional “three-sisters” bed of corn, beans, and squash interplanted.
Out in the swales, the cover crop has been growing nicely! We’ve been plating them with some perennials we’ve acquired recently, including two new varieties of honeyberries, a new variety of elder, some strawberries, and some herbs!
The human and animal members of the household have been enjoying the outdoor weather while it stays nice and cool. We all know that the summer heat is coming soon to chase us back into the shade!
