2020 Garden Update: May 28

Today marked the end of the lettuce season here in my North Alabama garden. Our salad at lunch definitely had a bit of a bitter, bolted edge to it, which told me it was time to pull up the lettuce patch and get ready for the next crop. Just recently the weather turned steamy, with 85 degree days and lots of rain, and the lettuce decided it was time to move on to the next phase of its life cycle. My family ate a lot of lettuce since our first harvest on March 10, so the lettuce patch was definitely a success!

I grew three kinds of lettuce this year - Merveille des Quatres Saisons, Little Gem, and Salad Bowl. The Salad Bowl seeds were left over from 2019 but germinated just as well as the 2020 seeds. Little Gem proved the favorite with the family, although the Quatres Saisons provided some red color and a different texture that enhanced our salads. I would grow all three again, but I'm also eager to try out some different varieties if I get the right weather for a fall lettuce crop. I've already ordered several packets of new lettuce seeds from Baker Creek to experiment with if we get the cool weather for it in October or November. Sometimes North Alabama goes right from summer to winter, so I won't know until we get there!

My runty carrots have mostly been pulled in service of our salads, and the green peas are seven feet tall and showing some signs of the heat, but the rest of the garden is just now getting into gear. I have several baby lemon squash, a slow but steady trickle of Husky Cherry Red tomatoes, and so many baby cucumbers that I'm a little worried about what we're going to do with all of them. The lemon cucumber plant has become a behemoth that threatens to take over the whole patio, but I'm too charmed by its massive size to do anything about it except create ever more support. I'm curious to see just how big it will get.

The pandemic continues to affect our errands and projects as we stay home in spite of our state's rush to reopen. I'm glad to have the garden to keep me busy and provide fresh produce for the household. The pollinator patch is a jungle of growth, the daylilies are beginning to bloom in earnest, and we have a family of house finches nesting in our carport, so each new day brings something of interest to see in the garden. Soon my blog posts should be full of cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes!

The Mid-May Garden: Salad Days of Spring

We finally got to enjoy some nice weather this week, at least nice by garden standards since it has been warm but also rainy. My cucumbers are growing by the minute, there's a baby lemon squash on one of my plants, and I have several cherry tomatoes ripening on the kitchen windowsill to keep the rodents from beating me to them. The heady harvest days of summer are still ahead, though, and it will be a few more weeks before I have big baskets of produce to share with my friends. Right now we're in the salad days of spring, with smaller, cooler weather crops producing perfect ingredients for tasty salads.

We have eaten an amazing amount of homegrown lettuce this year, partly because I planted more of it and started it earlier and partly because the pandemic means we're going to the store much less and really want that freshness in our diet. I think the Little Gem has turned out to be the family favorite; it has the romaine crunchiness and structure and has grown really well. Usually we eat a mix of all three varieties, but with the weather turning warmer now I'm trying to use up the more sensitive types and keep the Little Gem going longer because it's supposed to be the most heat tolerant.

 In the first weeks we had to supplement our salads with lots of canned or store bought toppings, but now we have our own produce! My runty carrots might not be good for much, but they are big enough for salads and also have tasty greens that can be added for more carrot flavor. My store bought Husky Cherry Red tomatoes are also producing a small but steady stream of fruit, which is great because it's going to take a lot longer for my seed grown heirloom varieties to do much. This cold spring was tough on baby tomato plants! The other exciting addition now is fresh green peas. My vines have been growing like champs; they're about six feet tall and loaded with pods. I have two types of peas this year, but I can't really tell the different between them. We eat them raw in our salads, but in a few days I should have enough to cook and serve with dinner. It would help if we stopped eating them in the salads, of course, but they're just too tempting.

 I've also found a great homemade salad dressing that uses my herbs. This herbed honey mustard dressing is simple to make, keeps in the fridge for up to two weeks, and uses whatever combination of herbs you have growing. I'm using sweet basil and thyme in the current batch, and it makes a fabulous finishing touch for our garden salads. If you're growing shallots you can certainly add them, but I am making this recipe without them and don't miss them.

Here's a summary of what's yielding in the garden as of May 19:

Green peas
Husky Cherry Red tomatoes
Little finger and Parisienne carrots
Lettuces (Little Gem, Salad Bowl, Merveille des Quatre Saisons)
Herbs (basil, thyme, oregano, mint, rosemary)

Spring Flowers: May 2020

It's another cold, rainy day here in North Alabama, with a cold front once again plunging temperatures well below average for this time of year. Every cold snap slows the warm weather veggies, but other parts of the garden have not minded a bit. Today we're checking in with the flowers and looking at what's doing well so far this first year at the new house.

First daylilies of the new year!

First up is the perennial I'm obsessed with, the daylily! We transplanted all of our Oakes Daylilies plants to the new house back in October and then bought some more earlier this year. I also brought over some smaller fans of the other daylilies I had at the old house, so there are quite a few daylilies in both the front and back yards. This week we had our first one bloom! A Stella D'Oro flowered in the front bed and brought some cheerful yellow color to the view. This powerhouse rebloomer is the daylily type you'll see at lots of shopping centers and public places because it continues to produce flowers all season long. It's inexpensive, easy to find at garden centers, and undemanding in the garden, where it shrugs off all weathers and grows in any kind of soil. While I like the Purple D'Oro better just for color, I was delighted to see the first daylily blooms of the season! Many of my other plants are forming clusters of scapes now, so I hope to have lots of blooms in the near future. Right now I'm only adding rebloomers to the collection so that the garden has more color for longer periods of time. I've got my eye on a few more additions from the current Oakes catalog!

Purple irises in the low ground bank.

The irises that we transplanted from the old house have also bloomed this week, and I'm pleased to see them coming along. Next year they will be stronger and have more clusters, but I only moved the smaller, younger plants from the old house and left the most robust clumps for the new owners (I sure hope they appreciate them!). I'd like to add more irises to our collection for next year; all of ours were accidental additions that came along with the free daylilies we first dug up from our friend's yard. I've come to like them a lot, however, and I'm looking to acquire some different colors and types when I can. Irises are especially good in a mix of daffodils and daylilies where they bloom after the daffodils and before the daylilies, extending the period of interest in the bed. We have several in the bank at the lowest spot along the fence, where everything seems to be taking the wetter conditions in stride. Later the irises will give way to the daylilies planted all around them, but there's plenty of room for both irises and daylilies to spread.

I had trouble with my dwarf sunflowers this year, mostly because little critters dug several of them up early on, but the few that made it are now starting to bloom. The little teddy bear sunflower is really cute! I hope the chipmunks don't come back and finish it off. The dwarf varieties seem fussier than the tall sunflowers and less eager to germinate, but the tall ones became magnets for squirrel raiders last summer, and I ended up having to cut them down once the rodents stole the heads and broke the leaves, leaving only tattered stalks behind. I might have to give up on sunflowers entirely and switch to something less like a rodent buffet, which is a shame because I love the big flower heads looming over the garden.

Salmon pink lily with three blooms.

 The pollinator patch is also filling in really well now, with tall spikes of gladiolus at the back, although my experiment with the low-growing variety of wildflowers is not nearly as exciting. I might stick with the original mix from now on, even though it has a lot of clover in it. Last year the pollinator mix grew with abandon and brought joy to bees and butterflies all summer. The rest of the flowers are a mix of previous hits and new experiments. Around the garden we can see liatris, mini glads, tall glads, lilies and other flowers making progress. Some of the lilies have already finished blooming, but several are still working up to their first flowers, and it has been interesting to see what colors we ended up with from the mixed bag we bought. The mini glads have been slower to sprout than the tall ones, and I think quite a few of them might not grow at all, which is disappointing, but I'm glad we hedged our bets with a bag of the tall types! In the fall we'll add more bulbs to the beds, taking into account which kinds the squirrels seem least interested in eating. It will take a few years for the empty patches to fill in as the plants spread, but eventually my cottage garden dreams will be fulfilled.

Remember if you're new to gardening during the pandemic that there are lots of online plant retailers who will ship seeds, bulbs, bare root plants, and even potted starters to your door. Holland Bulbs, Eden Brothers, American Meadows, Smokeys Daylilies, and of course my favorite, Oakes Daylilies, are all ready to set you up with all the flowers you could possibly want! You can also look for flowers at your local, independent nursery, where social distancing and safety measures are probably well established by now. Visit them early in the morning on a weekday if possible to avoid feeling crowded, and remember to wear your face covering and use hand sanitizer!