In the Garden ~ Sunday May 7th
I finally got to spend a solid chunk of time in the garden! A week ago - Sunday May 7th - was an absolutely beautiful sunny day here in Rossland, and I dedicated about 3 hours in the afternoon to the garden. Not only did my soul feel nourished...but I was productive too :)
Let’s take a look...
I started by top dressing the greens in our hoop/greenhouse with rich compost that we generate here on our own property. Check out the difference! This is black gold we’re talking about here friends!
We’ve got a 3-bin compost system that is loaded right now, as well as a leaf bin that decomposes leaves and other yard waste all year long. This compost came from our leaf bin. Isn’t that amazing?!! I’ll be taking an in-depth look into composting at some point this year, so stay tuned for that. It’s easy, and everyone can do it at home!
In the hoop/greenhouse right now we’ve got spinach, winter density lettuce, kale and swiss chard that we started indoors and transplanted out about 2 weeks ago. We also directed sowed radish + arugula, which is coming up nicely. Look at this delicious winter density lettuce – cold hardy, and ready to harvest quick. Yum! Another week or 2 and we’ll be picking this for good homegrown eats!
Here is a look at our Kale Sprouts – a new variety for us. It’s a hybrid of kale and brussel sprouts, and provides and abundance of small kale leaves to harvest and eat. It’s our first year trying this variety out, I’ll let you know how it goes!
Hello Happy Hens!
After top dressing the greens bed, saying hi to our happy hens, I started in on Bed #7. I started by weeding out all the weeds; then I did a minimal till of the section I was prepping to plant; added our Gaia Green general fertilizer (organic – I’ll share more about this); followed by a top dressing of delicious compost.... then BAM ready for plants. Here is a before and after:
And a little close up of the bed ready for plants and seeds, below.
What a difference a good layer of compost makes, hey? I was very generous. I slathered it on there. The top dressing of compost was about 2” thick. We will top dress at least two more times over the course of the summer. Compost = food for plants!
Once bed #7 was ready, I transplanted our sad green onion starts. Honestly, this job wasn’t fun. It was kind of a big pain in the butt! I am direct sowing green onion seeds next to the starts to see how much of a head start on eating fresh green onions we actually get. I want to know if starting a batch of green onions indoors was actually worth it, or if direct sowing is just as efficient. Time will tell – and I will report back!
As well as green onion starts, I also began transplanting leeks, which is a bit more time consuming because you literally separate out each individual leek. You want to space them out (about 4-6” between leeks, and 4-6” between rows). Our leeks are fantastic. They are about 2” thick with a beautiful white stalk. I’m really excited for another delicious crop of homegrown leeks.
I also planted shallots, which you plant as bulbs.
Between the shallots, leeks and green onions I planted some White Nigella flower starts and a few rows of carrots. A cilantro plant is going in there too :) Companion planting is an excellent way to create biodiversity in your garden and help to naturally combat unwanted pests and disease. For anyone interested in learning more about companion planting.... your best companion will be the book called Carrots Love Tomatoes. This book is always with us when we’re planting in the spring – one of the many extremely useful guides I will refer to you :)
I also planted some hens + chicks in a rocky slope we have above one of our beds. We have this kind of ugly slope, and are trying to come up with an easy way to fill it with plants that don’t need our attention :) This is a start!
The last thing I did in the garden was start into bed #6. Again with the weeding, minimal tilling, fertilizing and top dressing with compost. In went the rest of our kale sprout starts!
I’m looking to harvest baby kale leaves from these plants, not big honkin’ kale leaves, so I planted them a bit closer together.
If you are growing kale, and would like great big yummy kale leaves, you will want to space your plants out 12-18”.
Finally.... I want to really emphasize just how GOOD it felt to get my hands in the dirt. Everything else in the world disappears when I’m in the garden. My soul feels nourished, rejuvenated and refreshed. My garden is my happy place.... my favourite place in the world to be.
Where is YOUR happy place?
It took me a week to get this blog post up, because we've had a realllllly busy week. And now, today, I woke up to wet snow, and yesterday we woke up to frost! Ohhhhh life in the mountains....you sure keep us on our toes! Stay tuned, I plan to be back out in the garden before the week is out!
