Design

It was a good day in the garden. Feeling much better today after a nasty bout with H1N1 last week, my gardening companion and I puttered happily doing (relatively) small garden projects. Tiring, of course, and it required a bit of rest on both of our parts, but it was delightful to be outside. I cleaned up the rest of the satellite (vegetable) garden, and transplanted some asparagus seedlings that I'd grown from seed (a European variety called Precoce d' Argenteuil) which I'd purchased in an enthusiastic buying session last winter. They clearly must have been described in a evocative way. They were nice hefty young seedlings and I tucked them into a bed rich with organic matter. I covered other beds with nicely decomposed straw, thanks to my hay bale experiment last spring. I didn't actually end up with crops from the hay bales (uh, woodchucks can climb, I guess), but the compost planting holes stimulated decomposition much more rapidly than usual. One of the doub...

There's such a resurgent interest in growing vegetables here in the U.S.. Hooray! Even non-vegetable gardeners (based on our Garden's volunteer appreciation lunch today) have heard of the Eat the View campaign to encourage transforming part of the White House lawn to an organic vegetable garden. In Victory Garden days, apparently 41% of the vegetables consumed in the U.S. came from home gardens. I know from my experiences with my (relatively small) vegetable garden areas that we have vegetables/greens to eat from April to October/November, enough that I don't need to buy much fresh produce at the grocery store during that time. I haven't focused yet at growing enough to can, freeze, or otherwise preserve, but perhaps that's the next step.

A brief mention of rotating vegetables in a talk yesterday morning encouraged a question about how to rotate garden crops -- important for a sustainable (organic) kitchen garden, simple in concept, but sometimes challenging in practice. The principle is simple: rotate crops that are grown in a single area by plant family. There are a number of plant families represented in common vegetables, but not so many that it's easy to avoid repeat plantings. Ground rules: Don't plant tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, or potatoes (tomato family: Solanaceae) in the same area for 3 (preferably four) years, ditto with kale, broccoli, cabbage (mustard family: Brassicaceae). Alternate plantings with lettuce, chicory, marigolds (in the Asteraceae, or daisy family), carrots, parsley, fennel, or dill (in the parsley family: Apiaceae), onions, garlic, and shallots (in the onion family: Alliaceae), beans and peas (in the pea family: Fabaceae), squash and gourds (in the squash family: Cucurbitaceae)...