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!

Love for Lettuce

This year I got my lettuce started on time and have been really pleased to have fresh salad greens available at home throughout the early spring. It can be so hard to wait for the warm weather crops to get growing, which makes rows of tasty lettuce all the more delightful! Lettuce is an easy crop to grow in cool weather, in a small space, and with minimal fuss, and you can easily find a couple of different varieties to liven up your salad bowl. Lettuce is definitely going to be a staple in my kitchen garden going forward!

I sowed seeds from three different types of lettuce this year: Little Gem and Merveille des Quatre Saisons from Baker Creek Seeds, and a Salad Bowl variety from Burpee that I grew last year. All three have done equally well this year and each offers a different color or texture that goes well in combination. I'm using all of these as cut and come again, although the Merveille and Little Gem do form heads (we'll see if I'm patient enough for any to get to that point). I sowed the rows thickly so that I could thin them out as we go through the season, and so far there's still plenty of each growing. I have a row of each in a raised bed in the garden and a large shallow pot of Salad Bowl growing on the patio; the pot actually grew more quickly than the rows, partly because I could move it around for maximum sunlight.

With the pandemic making grocery runs more complicated, it's hard to keep a lot of really fresh produce on hand right now, and the lettuce has been much appreciated as a way to get a garden fresh green into our regular diet. We're experimenting with different salads using canned or packaged ingredients; one favorite has been a salad using canned peaches, pistachios, fresh mint from the garden, and feta cheese. Lettuce is also great for perking up a sandwich, bedding under a bean salad or couscous, or plating with an omelet. The best part is that the lettuce is there when we're ready for it instead of wilting in the fridge.

Our weather this year has been up and down quite a bit, so I don't know how long my lettuce will keep growing before the heat gets to it. If you're in a cooler planting zone you could still plant lettuce for your pandemic victory garden now, assuming you can get the seeds (many online retailers are sold out due to a tremendous surge in demand). Next year I hope to add even more varieties of lettuce to the early garden now that I know how easy it is to grow in containers as well as beds. What varieties of lettuce do you grow? I'd love some suggestions for the 2021 garden!

Newbie Gardener: You CAN Grow Mint!

I planted this pot of mint last spring.

If you've never successfully kept plants alive, starting a garden of any size can be a daunting prospect. This spring lots of people are turning to vegetable gardening to cope with anxiety and provide a stable food source for their families in wildly uncertain times, but for the absolute newbie or apartment dweller those rows of tomatoes and massive mounds of squash can be a non-starter. Where to begin if you want to grow SOMETHING but don't know anything about gardening?

I've got one word for you: MINT.

If you have a semi-sunny space for a pot anywhere then you can grow mint. Mint is so hard to kill it basically functions as a weed. Once you start a pot of mint you will have plenty of it for as long as you want. The one thing you must know up front is that you should never, ever plant it in a bed because then you will have beds of mint forever, and the mint will spread and take over until you have mountains of the stuff. PLANT THE MINT IN A POT!!!

Aside from being impossible to kill, mint is super handy in the kitchen. You can use it in tea, alcoholic beverages, salads, meat dishes, and even desserts. The more you harvest the more it will grow, so feel free to use it liberally once your pot of mint gets established. There are quite a few kinds of mint if you have specific uses in mind, but a generic mint is tasty and versatile.

Put the pot of mint in a sunny spot, water it every now and then, and watch it grow like crazy. It doesn't need fancy soil conditions, fertilizer, or any special treatment. Pests mostly leave it alone and will have a hard time making a dent in it even if they do pay a visit.

My pot of mint from last year wintered over, died back in the cold weather, and is now bursting with new growth. My front beds, unfortunately, are also full of mint because the previous owner naively planted it there, and I will be pulling mint out of those beds until I'm old and gray.

There has never been a better time to start growing something, especially a practical kitchen staple that you can use lots of different ways. You can get small pots of mint at nurseries, home improvement stores, and even grocery stores (our local Publix always carries small kitchen herbs in pots). Call and ask about delivery or curbside pickup if you need to avoid any risk of contact.

Garden Wishlist for 2020: Squash

Harvest early and often!

In my last post I tackled the massive topic of tomatoes, but squash is much less complicated for me. While there are many, many varieties out there to choose from, I have to be practical about squash because my small family can only eat so much of it. Last year I definitely went overboard with six plants - 3 yellow squash and 3 zucchini - that produced so much my kid was actually relieved when the vine borers appeared. For 2020 I'll be sticking with a smaller quantity of squash that we'll enjoy until the pests inevitably take over.

Yellow Squash

The first year I grew squash I chose the most traditional Southern version, the yellow crookneck squash. This is the yellow squash I remember from my grandfathers' gardens when I was a child; it was usually destined for a casserole. I never liked them as a kid but was tempted by the starts at the garden center and brought a few home. Boy, did they grow! We found a couple of recipes we all actually liked and ate lots of squash for several weeks before the vine borers showed up. I had to learn the hard way about the predestined end of all Southern squash, and eventually I pulled up the riddled vines and called it a day.

Squash plant in May 2019

Aside from the pests, the only problem I had with the yellow crooknecks was their shape. That crook was always growing around a vine or otherwise getting itself caught so that picking the squash proved tricky. So, in 2019, I chose the Early Prolific Straightneck Squash from Baker Creek Seeds and planted three hills in my raised beds. They grew quickly and produced abundantly, so much so that we had soon eaten as much squash as we could handle and had run out of friends who wanted more. This time I planned for the vine borer arrival and pulled the plants once their presence was obvious so that cowpeas could grow in that space instead. Changing out crops turned out to be a great tactic, and I will definitely do that again now that I have a smaller garden.

This year I still have plenty of Early Prolific Straightneck Squash seeds to plant, but I think I might have just one hill instead of three.

Zucchini

Monster zucchini!

Last year I opted for the Green Bush Zucchini from Baker Creek Seeds and had good luck with them, although I think we ultimately got more yield from the yellow variety. For 2020 I'll be sticking with the same type because I still have quite a few seeds in the packet. My family actually seemed to like the zucchini better than the squash, so I might plant two hills of zucchini and just one of the squash. We'll see if my smaller space has room for these fast growing vines! I did find out that these zucchini will grow into monstrous baseball bats if you don't keep an eye on them; I came back from a vacation to find that a friend had missed a few of them when checking my garden. They were huge but not worth eating by then, so they went straight to the compost bin.

Squash and Zucchini 2019 Record

2019 planting date - March 24
2019 sprout date - April 3
2019 first harvest - May 14 (yellow), May 26 (zucchini)
2019 pull date - July 1 (vine borers)

We'll see how the weather does here in North Alabama for the 2020 planting. Our last frost date this year is April 2, but we might well warm up before then!

Do you plant squash in your garden? How much and what kinds? I'd love to try some different varieties once I figure out the spacing in the new garden and find spots for everything, so let me know what you recommend in the comments!

New House, New Garden

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I decided to start this kitchen blog because I moved to a new house in October 2019, which means I have a whole new garden to build and develop! Our new yard is much smaller than our old one, but with good planning and efficient use of the large patio area I should have plenty of room to grow quite a lot of vegetables and flowers.

The Challenges

This new house is less than five years old, which means the soil in the yard is pretty poor, with quite a bit of construction debris in the mix. Luckily, raised beds and containers are my preference, and the flowers I'll be planting directly into the ground aren't fussy. The small backyard has uneven ground and a long dogleg section, and other areas for planting are partial to full shade. I'll be learning a lot about shade loving plants this year!

The blank canvas in September 2019.

The Benefits

At our old house, we spent a lot of time on grounds maintenance in the very large, woody backyard that we could have spent growing flowers and vegetables. Our new yard has just enough space to grow things I want to have without the intense upkeep of a big yard with lots of trees and lawn. I like to think of it as more British allotment size than American yard size! The new backyard is also a blank canvas that I can plan and develop from scratch. We'll be working to make the established beds with the builder's usual suspects (dogwood, azalea, generic shrubs, liriope) more interesting, too, but there's also plenty of opportunity to develop those because we don't have a lot of old growth to clear first. I have a large patio area at the new house that I can fill with annuals and container gardens, and I have a lovely back porch where I can sit and enjoy the view during the warmer months.

Getting Started

The beginning of a garden in November 2019.

Our first job after moving was to transplant our beloved Oakes daylilies to the new yard and move some of the nicest of the garden boxes for the future raised beds. I brought over the big pot of mint and some rosemary plants grown from cuttings of my old rosemary, but the previous owner already planted rosemary in the front beds, so I'll have to think about the herb garden priorities come spring. We also bought about 100 daffodil and tulip bulbs and planted those in both the beds and the most sloped part of the backyard. We interplanted daffodils and tulips with early, mid, and late spring blooming seasons with the equally varied daylilies, which should mean that we have a colorful show for people and pollinators from early spring all the way to fall.

Garden boxes in January 2020 - late afternoon.

We also transplanted a beautiful Lady Banks rose from the old house, and so far it's doing well. Ideally it will grow over the naked fence and spread - we put up wiring to support it as it does. Our weird winter weather might wreck some of my plans; we've had cold and then spring like warmth and now a very cold snap again, just as all the plants had decided it really was spring.

We found a collection of leftover fence posts tucked behind the carport and upcycled them into raised beds along the back section of the yard. That area gets good sun but has buried cables under it, so we don't want to dig or plant anything with deep roots there. Those beds will be for the pollinator patch and other sturdy plants that don't need a lot of watering but do want more sun.

Current Progress Report - January 2020

It's now mid January of 2020, so much of the work is on hold until March, but I've got 4 raised garden boxes for vegetables, 3 long beds for pollinator flowers and various herbs, and two areas in the backyard devoted to daylilies and daffodils. As we wait for spring I'll be collecting containers for my patio garden, ordering seeds and bulbs, and drawing up plans. In my next post I'll talk about the vegetables and flowers I most want to grow in the new garden!