Season's first salad

Last night, we enjoyed our first fresh-from-the-garden salad of the year: baby spinach, baby arugula, mizuna (Japanese mustard green), and some bunching onions (scallions) that had overwintered from last year's garden tossed with store-bought red onion, black olives, and feta cheese. Dressed with a sprinkle of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and fresh ground black pepper. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!


I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote back in April that my April 13th planting of lettuces and salad greens would be ready in 2-3 weeks. Wishful thinking, I guess (and not reading the seed packet ;-) It's been roughly 5 weeks since planting and though I've been munching on some of the salad greens right out in the garden for over a week now, the lettuces are only just now getting to the point where they can be clipped and harvested. In fact, besides pinching off a leaf here and there to taste, I probably won't harvest any for a salad for another week or two. (Note to self: Plant earlier next year ;-)

However, now's the time for me to think (and act) about succession planting all the lettuces and salad greens that I haven't already -- either with the same varieties or different varieties as taste dictates. I've already planted a second 2 rows of spinach and need to do the same for the rest. Succession planting ensures consistently high quality ingredients throughout the growing season and is one of the mantras of Eliot Coleman's (and really all good gardeners') approach to getting the most and the best out of the garden. As current crops fade, they're replaced by vibrant, tasty, new ones. And one's palate is the beneficiary! I'll be planting new rows of lettuces and salad greens this w/e.

Lee Reich's annual garden and plant sale comin' up May 29-30

Lee Reich, author of several organic gardening and tree growing books (and one of my gardening mentors) holds his annual garden and plant sale on May 29 (5:30pm-7pm) and May 30 (9am-11:30am) at 387 Springtown Road, New Paltz (255-0417).

His ad in the Woodstock Times touts "currants, gooseberries, raspberries, and other delicious fruits, . . . hydrangeas, honeysuckles, . . . and much, much, more". If you're in the area, check out the sale. If you bring a copy of one of his books, maybe he'll sign it for you. Can't hurt to ask ;-)

Tipping point?

Well, it's 34 degrees at 5:25am, having dropped a degree in the 20 minutes that I've been up today. No sign of frost patches on the ground but there is a fine layer of frost on the car windshields that you can scrap off with a fingernail. All my plants are tucked in under 6 mil plastic which should have protected them overnight. Let's hope.

Right now I'm just looking forward to all the good weather that's set to come our way for the next 10 days or so. I think we've finally reached a seasonal tipping point (knock on wood!) with 70 and 80 degree daytime highs and overnight 50 degree lows for the most part coming up. Hurrah! I'll be planting my started plants in their beds this week ;-)

Four Winds Farm heirloom seedling sale

Friday afternoon, I took the opportunity to run down to the Four Winds Farm at 158 Marabac Road in Gardiner, NY for their annual heirloom seedlings sale. Every year, on the third Friday and Saturday of May, Four Winds Farm, certified organic by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of NY, provides a large selection of started heirloom plants for sale. Everything is very reasonably priced: most varieties are available in 4-paks for $4 with some varieties offered as 1-paks for $2. Even though I start lots of heirloom plants from seed at home, I like to go to this seedling sale to find out about and try new varieties. Also, Four Winds' seedlings are weeks ahead of mine in terms of growth so I pick up some of their started plants just because I know they'll be producing before mine.

Friday was a gloriously sunny day making the drive down to Gardiner especially pleasant. I was in a benevolent mood after, along with another concerned motorist, successfully helping an ungrateful snapping turtle cross a very busy Rte 32 between Tillson and New Paltz. When I arrived at Four Winds, overflow cars were parked out on the road and plant-laden customers were making their way down the dirt drive from the orchard above where they had bought their seedlings. I decided to wait a couple of minutes while the young fellow at the foot of the drive used a walkie-talkie to let some cars out so I could drive all the way up to the orchard and park there.

Once out of the car, I walked by the woman selling maple products out of the back of her van and the cage full of brown runner ducklings for sale ($12 for one; $20 a pair) -- I wisely resisted the urge to buy a couple as birthday gifts for Linda but it was tough, they were mighty cute -- to rows of tables with hundreds of started plants: herbs, cukes, tomatoes, peppers, melons, eggplants, kales, lettuces. Alongside dozens of other prospective gardeners, I strolled a couple of times up and down the rows of plants admiring things before grabbing a cardboard carton and loading it up (twice!) before checking out. Here's what my $64 got me:

4 Pride of Wisconsin melons
4 Rocky Ford melons
8 Jimmy Nardello's peppers
4 Cubanelle peppers
4 Ancho/poblano peppers
4 Black Beauty eggplants (I goofed and grabbed the wrong 4-pak, I wanted the Rosita eggplants ;-(
4 Marketmore 76 cukes
4 Glacier tomatoes
4 Beams Yellow Pear tomatoes
4 Oregon Spring tomatoes
4 Opalka tomatoes
4 Aunt Ruby's German Green tomatoes (these are very, very tasty green tomatoes, excellent served on top of fresh mozzarella, sprinkled with coarse sea salt, pepper, and just a touch of olive oil)
4 Wisconsin 55 tomatoes
2 Tasty Evergreen tomatoes

Don't ask me where I'll find the room to plant all of these along with my own started plants! I already know I'll be building new beds to try to accomodate everything.

BTW, I've found Jay Armour, who runs Four Winds Farm, to be a really helpful fellow. In the past, when I've emailed organic gardening questions to him, I've always received prompt, useful answers. Besides producing organic vegetables for community supported agriculture (CSA) customers, his farm also provides organic beef, chicken, turkey, duck, and lamb for sale.

Of things spinach and succession planting

I was carrying on a gardening conversation with my friend Joann via Facebook recently. I mentioned spinach as an early spring crop possibility and she said she'd try it next year. But there's no time like the present and there's no reason to put yourself in a box about only planting once a season in your garden.

It's not too late to plant spinach this year even though you could have started sowing it back in late March. It likes cooler weather better but you can seed short rows (2-4 feet long) of it every week from now until the end of May. This way you get succession crops so when you finish the older stuff, the newer stuff becomes available. Also, once the spinach is up high enough, you can mulch it with straw to help keep the soil cooler and keep it from drying out too fast.

I've also planted spinach much later than the end of May. It's good to experiment and see what works for you. It may bolt but what did you lose if it does? A few minutes of planting and a few feet of your garden for a few weeks? Small price to pay.

A warm/hot weather option is New Zealand spinach which isn't a spinach at all (I think it's part of the onion family) but looks like and tastes like spinach when cooked. It also grows like crazy and only a couple/three plants will keep you in it. You can order it from online organic seed companies like Fedco.

Succession planting is one of the credos of one of my two gardening book mentors: Eliot Coleman (the other is Lee Reich). In his books (I have Four Season Harvest and The New Organic Grower), he recommends that you not relegate planting of a crop to the beginning of the growing season but to think of growing seasons as fluid where sowing and harvesting can overlap and be used to extend the harvest and maintain the freshness of your garden vegetables. In Four Season Harvest, Coleman provides a nice table of recommendations for succession planting summarized here:

Beans Every 2 weeks
Beets Every 2 weeks
Carrots Every 2 weeks
Celery Twice: early spring and three months before fall frost
Cucumbers A 2nd and 3rd planting at monthly intervals to keep quality high
Lettuce/greens Every week or two
Peas Twice: early spring and mid-summer
Radishes Every week
Spinach Every week in spring and late summer.
Squash A 2nd and 3rd planting at monthly intervals to keep quality high

My cousin Chris, the vintner at his family's winery, Lakewood Vineyards, and avid gardener turned me on to Eliot Coleman's books and methods. Coleman advocates low impact, quality yield organic growing methods that anyone can adopt and extend as their own. He farms in coastal Maine so he knows about late springs and early falls and how to adapt to grow and harvest crops all year long. And to prove that Coleman's suggestions work, my cousin Chris showed me his cold frame: the one he was dusting snow off of when he harvested salad greens in February! More on cold frames in a future post ;-)

Last gasp?

Time to cover up! Patchy frost forecast for tonight and probably tomorrow night. According to the Cornell Cooperative Extension, last spring frost date for our area is May 10 so frost appears to be overachieving this year ;-) I'll be covering my beds and some trees with 6 mil plastic tonight and tomorrow night just in case. Hard to believe that we had 4 days of 90 plus weather only a couple of weeks ago and a muggy day of thunderstorms just yesterday.

Raised beds and imported organic soil

Several years ago, when I started my vegetable garden, I settled on using raised beds due to the poor soil quality on our property. Basically, we have clay and rocks for soil so I needed to improve it with various soil amendments like fertilizer and peat moss. Things really took off in my garden when my office mate at work, Charlie, offered me a truckload of several year old horse manure. I mixed the manure with the soil I had and made mounded, raised beds to plant in. The next year, to improve my soil and build more raised beds, I bought an organic mix of topsoil and compost from McEnroe Organic Farm. The soil itself isn't terribly expensive ($41 per cubic yard these days) but add in the trucking fee and each 5 cubic yard truckload ends up costing you nearly $400. So far, I've justified the cost (and my carbon guilt over having organic soil trucked 50 miles to my house) by rationalizing that gardening is my one true hobby and that great soil produces great tasting vegetables. Once I start producing enough compost for my garden on my own, I'll no longer need to buy soil and/or compost and I'll be able to return to my more naturally frugal, greener approach to life.

There are pluses and minuses to growing in raised beds. Hot weather plants (for example, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers/chiles, melons, squash, and eggplant) can thrive in them because they definitely heat up more quickly than the surrounding soil. But, because of that, they also tend to dry out quicker and so are not the best choice when it comes to water conservation. And, of course, plants that like it cooler (for example, peas and spinach) may require some mulching with straw to cool off the warmer soil in a raised bed. For me, I had the choice of doing a full replace of my rocky, clay soil or building raised beds on top of them. Raised beds saved me some work.

BTW, I found out about McEnroe's Organic Farm through a book Linda had given me as a present: Keith Stewart's It's a Long Road to a Tomato. The book is a collection of Keith's writings for The Valley Table magazine which is a publication dedicated to local food, farms, and cuisine in the Hudson Valley. Keith was in his 40s living in NYC, working as a corporate project manager, when he decided to go back to the land. He purchased a farm in Orange County and over time, became a full-time organic farmer and he currently sells his produce at the Union Square farmer's market in NYC. It's a great read, a great story of a return to the land complete with beautiful drawings (by his partner Flavia Bacarella) and lots of insight and tips for the organic farmer. Every year, Keith trucks in McEnroe's organic compost to start his vegetables in. Check it out!