Design

carrots from the deep raised bed My deep raised bed has actually produced some pretty big carrots, in spite of my fussing about not being able to grow good carrots.  These are big, and tasty, too, especially when cooked. Apparently in the mountains, I can start sowing carrots for fall in mid-July.  I think I'll do that!  Maybe they'll be extra sweet after a bit of fall frost. A quick trip down to the Piedmont meant harvesting a block of potatoes and a lot of green tomatoes (I didn't like the idea of leaving them for the resident woodchuck). Hopefully the tomatoes will ripen and be decently tasty, for cooking at least. fresh garlic ready to use I've 'processed' plenty of garlic; it's all cleaned and ready to use. I'll probably use it up more rapidly this year, as curing conditions weren't so good for long-term storage.

I sowed more seeds this evening.  It's exceptionally warm in the mountains, with teasingly warm soil.  I'm quite sure it's too soon to sow beets and carrots (I did anyway), but an Asian green from Burpee  (Senposai, a cool-sounding hybrid between cabbage and mustard spinach-Komatsuna) might do well, along with a Japanese turnip variety from a local seed company ( Sow True ) called Shogoin. My spinach, peas, and chard have all emerged, but I was chastened by seeing an extremely productive bed of overwintered chard and spinach near the local whole foods/organic market.  Yikes, the spinach leaves were giant (uh, thanks to 10-10-10?) and the chard looked big, too, for this time of year,  And this was just in a small front-yard veggie garden.  Hmm.    Or maybe they just hadn't harvested the spinach, so that's the reason for the big leaves....or it's some enormous-leaved spinach variety?

We're not in a good location for root vegetables. I keep running across cheerful pieces about how easy radishes, carrots, and beets are to grow. Not in the Piedmont (of the Southern US), they're not. The best-looking radishes I've seen 'locally" came from raised beds full of organic potting mix. Turnips are an exception, and a southern favorite, but I suspect they're most productive down in the sandy Coastal Plain parts of the Southern U.S, and we favor the green tops, in any case. Here in the Piedmont, our heavy clay soils, even greatly amended with compost and other organic matter, is still not exactly "loamy soil" - hmmm. And we have warm springs and long summers, and root vegetables are cool weather crops. There's a photo of Joan Gussow accompanying her book, This Organic Life: Confessions of an Urban Homesteader , that shows her harvesting huge fat carrots and beets in her NY garden. Hmrph, great for her (and it's a remarkable book...