Busy times in the garden

What a bountifully busy time of the year. There don't seem to be enough hours in the day to get it all done. I feel like I am choreographing a complicated ballet....getting seeds started ahead of planting time, prepping the garden beds, direct sowing, weeding, rearranging plants from previous plantings, re-designing certain areas of the established garden, creating new beds and doing away with more lawn! There is SO much happening... and even with my best of intentions to keep up with blogging about all of this, it seems to be the blogging that falls by the wayside. Can't eat the blog... spend time on the food.

This is the first garden year.. (year number 4) that I have been working without a bunch of help from friends and co-conspirators.. As much as I liked having the help and company, I am certainly enjoying the solitude that I find out there by myself. My daughter, Rebecca, now nearly 8, helps out when she gets a mind to and my fiancée, David, helps when I need him... but mostly it is me out there keeping up with the ballet which is Spring planting time. I am a busy farmer!

This year I have added a new batch of Asparagus, so I now have 3 plantings of Asparagus. We have been getting a few spears here and there.. generally not enough to have a big asparagus feed.. but rather tastes of asparagus in other things.. YUM! Last night, however, we had asparagus sautéed with garlic and mushrooms as a side dish.. the closest we've come to getting to really eat asparagus.. wow... what a treat! I am looking forward to MORE!

I have also added Jerusalem Artichokes this year.. this is a first for my garden but my parents grew them when I was growing up and I remember really enjoying them. They have a new bed outside the garden fence.

I rearranged the herb bed on Saturday. It was time to give the sage plants more space and to break up the chives. Everything got a little cultivation and mulch. Then Sunday was a day of light rain. What perfect timing. Everything looks fabulous!

There is lots of salad greens for fresh salads and kale that wintered over and is now producing well. Spinach that made it through the winter and snow peas are up and coming soon. Arugula is doing well.. but now that it is warming up.. it is bolting.. but I keep cutting it back to prolong the going to seed process.

Life is good, Full and bountiful and BUSY!

A Recap of the First Year

So it all began over a pot of tea in December of 2005. J. had just moved from Atlanta and was living in an apartment just down the road from me. She was happy to be in Asheville but complaining that living in an apartment she didn't even have ground for a tomato plant... Me, I commiserated that while I had plenty of land to garden, I had no energy to get it started. We decided to pool our time and resources to get a garden going together.
We made our lists of what we wanted to grow and ordered seed from the Cooks Garden Seed Company in short order. By February we started our seeds...tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, broccoli, leeks...it was SO exciting!
We spread 4' X 4' squares of old carpet out on the lawn to begin killing the grass. On Easter Sunday we rented a tiller and had a tilling party. We tilled a 47' X 24' area right out in the front yard. As well as a large bed to plant the strawberry plants I had gotten on Freecycle!
There was a post on Freecycle that week by a woman who said that she was tired of the weeding and up-keep on her strawberry bed and would someone please come and dig them up!
Well I got about 75 June-bearing plants. They transplanted well and are thriving.
We also planted our first 25 Asparagus crowns. Following instructions in one of our many gardening books, we prepared our asparagus bed deep to really establish healthy plants. As I planted each crown I said, "You will feed my family for the next 20 years! Thank you!" There was a real sense of ritual in planting asparagus. I had read that Thomas Jefferson's Asparagus Beds were still producing! That is inspiring.
So in the end we had 50 tomato plants and had an amazing harvest. The frozen and dried tomatoes fed us throughout the winter and until the harvest began again! We had lots of peppers and even a good crop of eggplants. The seeds from Cooks Garden were great. They offer great mixes of seed variety packs so we were able to grow a wide variety of both sweet and hot peppers without having to purchase lots of seed to get the variety. I really like that.
By the end of that first season I had planted 5 blueberry bushes: Patriot, Jersey and Bluecrop. We did battle with the rabbits and a few ground hogs, installed a fence and I built a number of raised beds. I also accidentally got an extended season....growing well into the winter with kale, arugula, swiss chard and a few hardy lettuce varieties. I still had these things growing and used some row covers to keep them going. We had greens from the garden all winter-long.