Early spring planting

This past Monday, April 13th, I did my first plantings of the 2009 gardening season (not counting last fall's garlic planting). I directly seeded lettuce, salad greens, and spinach into some raised bed boxes that I finished building over the weekend.

I'm experimenting with bed boxes this year to contain my raised beds and keep them from their otherwise inexorable crumbling and flattening out into the paths between them. I also hope to use bed boxes as a base for cold frames that will fit over them. The cold frames will protect the early lettuce, salad greens, and spinach from overnight temperatures that are still hovering around freezing in these parts. I should be able to build and install my cold frames this coming weekend. In the meantime, I'll protect my plantings with plastic pulled over the raised bed boxes every night.

My beds are 3 feet wide and 18 feet long. Here's what I planted so far:

Five 4-foot rows (actually 47 inch rows ;-) spaced 6 inches apart of the following (seed company is in parentheses):

Crispino Green Iceburg Lettuce (Fedco)
Winter Density Bibb/Romaine Lettuce (Fedco)
Lollo Rossa Cutting Lettuce (Fedco)
Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce (Fedco)
Buttercrunch Bibb Lettuce (Fedco)

Another five 4-foot rows spaced 6 inches apart of the following:

Arugula (Bonus Pack)
Claytonia (Fedco)
Minutina (Fedco)
Sorrel (Fedco)
Early Mizuna Japanese Mustard (Fedco)

And another two 4-foot rows spaced 6 inches apart of:

Bloomsdale Long-Standing Spinach (Livingston)

All these lettuces, greens, and spinach love the cool early spring weather. I'm actually late in planting them. Friends of mine have had theirs planted for a week or two or more but I waited until I had my bed boxes built before I did my planting. Next year, I'll be that much more ahead of the game. In any case, in 2-3 weeks, if we don't encounter any setbacks, we'll be eating fresh organic greens from the garden. No more store bought, industrially grown, chemically treated salads. We'll be free of that stuff until next fall ;-)