The Modern Victory Garden

It’s mid February and the preserved items from the 2008 summer garden are fast being depleted.  Thankfully, the early crops of lettuces, chinese cabbage, corn salad, and overwintered spinach and swiss chard are providing some tasty young “mixed greens” salads for the dinner table but the harvests must be limited because the sun strength is still weak and the plants do not bounce back fast after a harvest.  This will improve with each passing day that brings increasing sun strength and day length.  

Looking ahead, the next crops coming online for harvest will be the early spring planting of kale (greenhouse), the spring planting of spinach (soon to be planted), and green onions (greenhouse).  Following these items will be asparagus and snap peas.  That’s when the dinner menu becomes much more interesting again!   It’s time to complete the annual asparagus patch maintenance and it will soon be time to plant peas.    

I got a start on the asparagus patch maintenance last Saturday.  I raked off the majority of the thick compost mulch that has been on the bed since last summer.   I used the compost to amend another bed with.    It's a nice finished compost by the time it has finished it's role as a mulch.

In the cool Cascadia Pacific Northwest, it is important to remove natural mulches like this from areas where you want the soil to warm up.   Natural mulch keeps soil cool and damp – not a big advantage in our cool/moist climate and especially not in the chilly damp of early spring.  Natural mulches also harbor slugs, which love to eat your produce too.     So an important first step in properly waking up the asparagus bed is to rake off the compost mulch.  Next weekend I will finish prepping the asparagus bed by spreading all-purpose organic fertilizer and then lightly cultivating it into the top inch or so of the soil.  This also serves the purpose of mixing in the remaining bits of compost, opens up the soil to air and moisture, and removes emerging weed seeds.      It’s important to do this BEFORE the shoots begin to emerge, as you do not want to damage the harvestable shoots.   By feeding the plants and exposing the soil to the sun’s warming rays – the bed will be encouraged to wake up and produce shoots.  Later in the spring when the harvest period is concluded, I will scratch in more fertilizer and then add back a layer of new compost mulch.  For the remainder of the summer I will then just monitor the moisture level of the bed – watering it as needed to keep the plants healthy and the fronds abundant and pull the occasional weed that decides to appear.    

The asparagus harvest is still some time away – but I am already looking forward to this crop’s arrival!