The Modern Victory Garden

With the exception of a 3-week deep freeze in December, our winter has been very mild this year.   Because of this, the soil temperatures have warmed up much faster this year and I can legitimately give thought to planting early crops extra early – but only with the added insurance of protective covering to hedge against a sudden reversal of weather fortunes.

I prepared the large 4-foot by 12-foot bed that would hold the pea patch yesterday so that I could take advantage of the forecasted beautiful weather for today (Sunday) to do the actual planting process.   Once again, I used my new planting jigs – this time the 2 inch spaced one.                     

Each square foot has 36 seeds with a 2-inch spacing, so the entire 4-foot by 12-foot bed had a total of 1,728 seeds placed in it!    Normally I would block plant a large area like this, but I want to see if the more carefully spaced seeds produce a more productive crop.   It took longer to seed the bed then it would have with a block planting approach - about 30 minutes to seed the entire bed with the assistance of my daughter.   It would have probably taken about an hour if I had done it all by myself.   I think that extra time invested in the planting will produce better results  - but only time will tell.          

Once the planting was completed, I watered everything thoroughly and then added my horizontal trellis support system (last year’s shop project).  

The final step was to top it all off with a protective covering of plastic sheeting. 

In addition to the pea planting, I did a few other garden related chores today.   First, I laid out all the seed potatoes on flattened cardboard boxes near one of the windows in the shop to encourage them to begin sprouting.   

I counted out 176 spuds and I will need 210 pieces for planting, so the larger potatoes will need to be cut.    Luckily there are more than enough large sized tubers in the mix to allow that to easily happen.     

I also moved the first planting of pac choi and lettuces out to the unheated greenhouse and planted them up. The lettuce was tucked in between the onion plantings and the pac choi took up the third half barrel container.    

The mache has been really dawdling along but is now getting some growth going.   Hopefully, we will be able to start enjoying some in salads before the end of March.                

The Chinese cabbage and the kale plants that I transplanted last weekend are doing really well in their new home in the greenhouse.   Hopefully the pac choi will settle in as nicely too.                                               

The greenhouse greens fill in a void during the early spring when the garden is starting to be planted up but is far from providing harvests and after all of the overwintered crops are depleted and removed.   Behind these greenhouse crops will come the garden rhubarb and not too long after that - asparagus.   In the meantime, we continue to use up the overwintered carrots and parsnips and the last of the overwintered cabbages to supplement our frozen and canned produce.                            

I hope you were able to do some garden related activities this weekend too.