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)

2020 Garden Update: April 29

The lettuce and green pea bed is doing great!

With the end of April we're moving into the real growing season here in Zone 7, although we've continued to have rainy, cool weather and a few cold snaps. I'm hoping to see the heat loving vegetables put on some serious growth over the next few weeks! The pandemic continues to affect the usual round of garden store errands and supply runs, so we are mostly making do at home. We made one trip to the local nursery last week with masks and hand sanitizer and picked up some much needed potting soil along with several more plants, but I think it will be quite a while yet before I venture into Lowe's or any more crowded store. The future is far from certain, but at least the garden gives me something to look forward to each morning when I go out to check on everything and see what has changed.

Lettuce continues to be the champ of this year's garden; we get several salads a week out of my crop, which I'm still using as cut and come again to get the most out of it. Alas, I once again failed at growing carrots. Only the Little Fingers germinated, and while they produced big, promising green tops they only grew runty little carrots. We ate them, anyway, and cut the greens up into our salads. I think this will be my last attempt at carrots; I don't actually like carrots enough to keep struggling with them!

Runty carrots again. Sigh.

The green peas are blossoming beautifully with many little pods starting to form, and I'm keen to eat those again because they were a big hit with the family last year. I just hope the critters don't make off with them! We had plenty last year without a net, but the chipmunks here at the new house seem determined to wreak some havoc. I will probably find out soon if I'm going to need to cover the peas with a net, but I hope not! The vines are growing really tall now, and once again I wish I had planted more of them, but this year is a learning curve with the smaller space and raised beds. Both types of green peas have come up just fine, but at this point I can't tell any difference between them.

The squash and zucchini are not nearly as big as I would like, but they are starting to have flowers, too, and I hope the warmer weather ahead will help them grow. I'm not sure they are getting quite enough sun where they are, but we'll see how they do over the course of May. It might just be the cold weather that has held them back, and I did plant them out pretty early this year. The lone survivor of the original cucumber seedlings - a dragon's egg - has also produced flowers, even though it is still a puny runt of a plant. It just won't give up! I admire that and potted it up even though my second round of seedlings is growing much better. The store bought tomatoes all have baby fruit now and lots of flowers, but the heirloom varieties are slow growing (as they were last year). I haven't been able to find the determinate cherry or yellow pear types because of the pandemic and not going to larger garden centers, so we're working with what we've got for now. I expect the darn chipmunks to make off with the lowest hanging tomatoes as soon as they get at all red, but the plants should soon get too tall for them to reach.

Astilbe is doing really well.

The shade garden has filled in quite a lot with hostas, astilbes, ferns, and coral bells. Most of those were bought as bare root plants in mixed bags, but we added several coral bells on our recent nursery run. I would love to have twice as many! I really like the colors, especially the lime. It's a tricky bed to plant in because of the drainage tube, buried pipe, and cables, but we're getting there.

The sunny flower beds are also coming along, especially the irises we moved from the old house. The first one bloomed today! I can see scapes on the Stella D'Oro daylilies and hope to have the first daylily blooms soon. The regular lilies have been doing well, and the tall glads all came up, but I think the mini glads are proving to be a disappointment. I also found out that the chipmunks dug up and ate all of my replanted tulip bulbs from the Valentine's Day pot! At least they didn't get the tulips we planted in the fall.

By this time next month I hope to have lots of flowers and some real vegetable success stories to share!

2020 Planting Record: February 11

The first round of lettuce has sprouted in the raised bed, but the Lincoln green peas have not yet shown any signs of germination, so I ventured out this morning while it wasn't raining to get a few more cool crop seeds started.

Seeds planted on Tuesday, February 11, 2020:

Salad Bowl Lettuce (Burpee)
Little Gem Lettuce (Baker Creek)
Garden Sweet Green Peas (Burpee)
Parisienne Carrots (Baker Creek)
Little Finger Carrots (Baker Creek)

Except for the Little Gem Lettuce, all of these are seeds left over from last year, so I expect slightly lower germination rates. So far all three of my lettuce varieties are sprouting nicely, and I'd like to have at least a second round of lettuce before it gets too hot.

Last year the Garden Sweet Green Peas were a bit hit and grew readily, and I'm feeling impatient about the Lincoln peas not sprouting yet. We'll see if this new round of Garden Sweet takes off!

Garden Sweet Peas from 2019

I have yet to have any luck at all with carrots, but since I have the seeds I am giving them one more go. It's a bit early to sow them, but my garden is very sheltered with its narrow space and high privacy fence, and I've got more of the seeds in a large pot that can be moved if some truly terrible weather heads our way. I would really like to grow a few decent carrots!

The problem with cool weather crops here in North Alabama is that our winters are wildly variable and spring gets very warm very quickly. We can have 60-70 degree days throughout the winter and then rocket up to 90 degrees early in the spring and stay there through October. I often wonder if our planting schedules and general advice really take the effects of climate change into account. I'm experimenting with the carrot seeds to see if I have any better luck with them by planting them in weather that feels more like a typical old-fashioned spring than our actual spring feels like these days.