Sunday, February 07, 2010

Saturday in the garden.

I know many of you are still buried under the snow storm.  Maybe a little more about my organic gardening will tide you over until you can get out and dig in your own dirt.

We've had an extremely warm winter this year.  Great for our heating bill, but not so great for the nearby winter olympics in Vancouver BC.  We're all in more or less the same weather area and the shortage of snow up north has kept us from freezing down here.  Anyhow, I've been watching the signs of spring for a few weeks now.  I held off on making any plantings because the calendar kept telling me "not yet Christi, it's just too soon."

Today I finally told that calendar to shut up!  It was a beautiful sunny day and by jove I was going to get in my garden to plant something!

With my seed stash in hand, I headed down to our little enclosed garden and threw open the gate then I got straight to work.  I pulled open the plastic cover on my boat garden and cleared out a few small weeds, cleaned the dead growth off the herbs, pulled out the brown leaves from the strawberries and planted 2 short rows of lettuce.  1 row is "salad bowl" and the second row is a mix of romaine with red and green leaf lettuce. 

The boat garden revealed - garlic, strawberries, fennel, lettuce and carrots

Next I focused my attention on an empty bed that held multi-colored carrots last year.  It is really important to rotate your garden crops to keep down on disease spread, so this year I planted 2 rows of my home grown organic onion sets and 3 intesively planted rows of peas from some seeds that my mom saved for me from her garden last year.


Now I was on a roll!  I still had 2 open beds ready for planting, so I went back through my seed stash and found a few more candidates for an early spring planting.  These beds grew my lushious tomato crops last year, so this year it would need to be something else. 

I decided 1 pea planting just won't be enough for me, especially since last years peas were devoured by our local deer (before we got the deer fence up).  I found a packet of Gray Dwarf peas in the mix.  These are really good.  You can use them as pea pods or as green peas, so I planted 1/2 of this open bed with the gray's, the other half I added 3 short rows of Olympic spinach, 3 short rows of Gormet Mix radishes and 3 plantings of Brussels sprouts.  Yummy! 

It doesn't look like much now, but in a couple
of months this intesive planting will be in full
production!

Feeling good about my progress, I decided to leave the bed unplanted for just a bit longer.  I threw the plastic cover back over the boat garden and called it a day.  Boy it sure was nice to get out there and get something new in the ground.  I'm glad I left the 1 bed empty, so that the next time I get the urge to plant I've got a whole bed ready for me!



2 comments:

  1. I am so glad I found your blog! We have similar interests and I've especially enjoyed your gardening posts! I live relatively close in Victoria BC and I've been suprised about the many veggies you can grow all year here.

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  2. Well hello Neighbor and fellow islander. Yes it's amazing how much we can grow in our temperate region here in the Pacific Northwest. I've been out in the garden some more lately and am happy to report that most everything is growing quite nicely. A few of my early plantings didn't take (spinach and radishes) but that's okay, I'm replanting those this week and expect them to come up nicely with the warmer weather.

    Thanks for commenting on my blog! I'm trying to post about the garden every Wednesday so feel free to stop in for a progress report. :0)

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