Green Beans and Peas

Our vegetable garden has five rows, each about 30 feet long.  Except for some perennial asparagus, the crops vary and are rotated annually.  With the winter behind us, this weekend we started planting a cover crop of green beans and peas throughout the empty garden.  Not only will these be edible when they mature, but they will discourage weeds thus reducing our reliance on chemicals, and retain moisture thereby cutting back on our use of water.  They will also give the area a pleasant uniform appearance.  If the cover crop is turned under before flowering, the plants will actually increase the nitrogen in the soil, or so I am told.  Next weekend we will finish with snow peas and cow peas.  The soil was amended with compost and manure in the fall, so no only a light tilling to remove weeds was required.

The 48" stick is marked at 3" intervals to serve as a guide

for spacing seeds.  The sheet of plywood prevents 

compacting the soil with bootprints while planting.

March Yard Pick Up

My young son said this was a "three holiday" weekend.  He meant Friday the 13th, followed by Pi Day on Saturday and the Ides of March today.  For me it was the annual weekend of outdoor cleanup.  Somehow I manage over the winter to accumulate various piles of debris around our yard.  This year it included a spoiled crock of sauerkraut, a large blue tarp, several defective watering containers, a number of five-gallon buckets, a stack of random red bricks, even more stacks of one-gallon pots, half a chord of firewood, and multiple locations where rabbit droppings that belong in the garden were dumped haphazardly by the hutches.  It is my hope that by chronicling it here I will be less likely to repeat this offense next winter.  Today the neighbors got most of it cleaned up and put away.  We even found an hour in the middle of the day to replace the brakes on the neighbor's truck which is a very rewarding experience considering that his life and the lives of his entire family depend on our doing it right.

For $20 we replaced the PVC pipe holding up the hoop house.

It has become an annual chore after the last snowfall.

The Next Generation of Peas

Like much of life, not everything about growing food, is happy, peaceful, and fruitful.  Even those who claim to have a green thumb are likely to make an occasional mistake.  Gardening does allow you to try and try again until you get things right.  This year we planted snow peas indoors in early January along side our wonderful trays of spinach, lettuce, and assorted other greens.  The greens are doing well but the peas are dead.  You might conclude from this that peas are difficult to grow, but you would be wrong.  In fact, growing snow peas is easy.  The "root cause" of our trouble (pun intended) was that the peas grew much, much faster than the rest of the seedlings.  In an outdoor garden under sunshine this is no trouble, but beneath the artificial grow lights of our system, the peas quickly became taller than their neighbors.  Had we raised the lights to accommodate the peas, the rest of the seedlings would have suffered.  Winter prevent us from putting the peas into the ground, and the recent snowfall has destroyed our hoop house once again.  So in a weak attempt to remedy the situation we moved the peas to the basement where they soon became neglected.  We will plant snow peas again, in the spring, in the ground, as we should have done in the first place.  And we vow to learn from our mistake and enjoy organic snow peas for years to come.

You might conclude that that is the end of the story, but you would be wrong about that too.  The root cause of the unfortunate snow pea neglect was that the neighbor has planted a sort of pea of his own, that is, he is expecting an addition to the family this spring.  It is his first offspring, I might add.  Preparation for the arrival of the youngling has the neighbors' minds on many things now that compete with gardening.  Without complaint we look forward to his arrival--we know it is a he, in fact--because it means we soon will have another hand to turn soil, pull weeds, and water the plants.  Just kidding, of course.  My advice to him, should he read this blog in the years to come, is to learn from his mistakes, no matter how few they are, and to resist the temptation to plant snow peas indoors.  Congratulations, Neighbor.

The Coldest Night of Your Life

With temperatures forecast around -8 to -4 degrees F tonight for Central Maryland, this could be the coldest night of your life if you were born and live here.  Given the weather, it is unlikely that we'll be actually planting anything outdoors anytime soon, so we're enjoying our trays of seedlings in a variety of creative new ways.  I cannot recall a past growing season when we ate so many of our tiny plants without planting them.  Last night we brought an entire tray of baby Bok Choi to share at a family dinner.  For lunch I made a ham sandwich with Arugula sprouts.  But the best so far was Chinese egg fried-rice with Tong Ho micro-greens for breakfast.  Time to grab a blanket, make a spot in front of the wood stove, and plant more seedlings!

 Left, baby lettuce; right, even the chickens

are rebelling against the cold weather.

Chinese Hot Pot

I grew up in the city, far away from the influences of farm life.  This may explain why I find so many aspects of growing food to be completely magical and unlike anything I have ever before imagined.  For example, tonight we harvested young seedlings to use in Chinese hot pot.  If you have never eaten hot pot, I encourage you to do an Internet search and try making it.  Chinese hot pot is a sort of stew made at the table typically for the evening meal during wintertime.  It is more of an assembly of ingredients and a way of cooking at the table than a recipe, although certain sauces can be prepared in advance.  Over the course of the meal, fresh ingredients are added to hot broth in the center of the table as you dine, including meat, fish, mushrooms, seafood, and fresh greens.  For tonight's meal we thinned five trays of three-inch seedlings to yield a large bowl of greens for use in the stew: lettuce, bok choi, Swiss chard, tong ho, and young kale.  The greens need only a few moments of blanching in the broth.  This is a wonderful and unexpected way to enjoy the rich nutrition and flavor of delicate greens.

Chinese Hot Pot prepared at the table, clockwise from upper right:

broth with tofu and mushrooms simmering on a propane burner,

peanut sauce, large colander of fresh micro-greens, thinly sliced beef.

Transplanting Indoors

It's hard to go from a full tray of healthy seedlings to a mere dozen plants or so, but it is for the better.  Our seedlings were planted too early to go into the unheated hoop house or beneath row covers.  Today's high temperature of 10 degrees (F) underscores the fact.  Their roots are becoming too long for trays and their tops too intertwined to separate as they vie for light and nutrients.  This afternoon we transplanted this tray of bok choi into deeper individual pots.  In a day or two these 15 plants will flourish again as they continue onward to maturity.  The process of selecting winners and losers is about as much fun as being cooped up indoors due to the weather.  We will keep the rest of the bok choi for a few days to make sure the transplants make it.  Next week we will consume or give away the rest.

Transplanted bok choi in the background came from the overcrowed tray

in the foreground.  The three heirloom mustard greens in the upper left

corner are the only survivors from an old pack of 2012 heirloom seeds.

Microgreens

Many of our indoor seedlings have reached three inches in height, making them perfect candidates for transplanting into larger containers or into the ground.  As much as we'd like to start planting under row covers or in the hoop house, the predicted cold weather and snowfall make it impossible.  In the mean time we are enjoying thinning the seedlings as this effort yields a delicious and healthy mix of edible tiny green leaves known as microgreens.  The lettuce, chard, and kale will make it into salads, while the bok choi and Asian green tong ho are a perfect addition to stir-fries and Chinese hot pot.  Most go straight from the tray to the mouth.  And it doesn't take much.  Some researchers claim that microgreens contain up to 40 times the concentration of nutrients, such as vitamin E, vitamin C, and beta-carotene, over their mature counterparts.

Harvesting four week-old Baby Arugula lettuce.

End of January Seedlings

Wood on the wood stove and temperatures below freezing tonight but our area has been spared from the heaviest snowfalls and lowest temperatures of the Eastern Seaboard.  Planted just two weeks ago, all of our seedlings are doing well, except for our heirloom mustard greens.  The mustard greens were vintage 2012 seeds, and only three came up from probably more than a hundred seeds planted.

Iceburg lettuce, bock-choi, spinach, and Arugula lettuce seedlings.

More Seeds Arrived

Winter can be so much fun for the gardener.  No beds to weed, no soil to haul, no rows to water.  Just contemplating the upcoming spring and planning our garden layout.  Today our latest seed order arrived.  We typically place a seed order in the winter to use in the following year's garden, which means that these new seeds may be planted 12 to 18 months from now.  I know some people have trouble storing seeds that long, but we haven't ever had much of a problem storing seeds at room temperature for a year.  We keep them in a drawer that is dark and safe from rodents.  My reason for ordering seeds a year in advance is so we are less affected in the unlikely event that seeds become unavailable.

We like the catalog and selection of

heirloom seeds from Johnny's Seeds.

First Seedings 2015...Are Up!!!

I cannot recall a year when our seedlings came up more quickly than this time around.  In just two days, the Romaine, Arugula, and Iceberg lettuce seeds have all sprouted.  Hopefully it is because we lowered the grow lights to just above the seed tray covers, and not because we planted the seeds too shallow.  Either way, they look great.  The Bok Choi which we put on a heating pad is up too. The grow lights are on for ten hours a day, from 10:00 AM to 8:00 PM.  In addition, large windows in the room provide generous ambient light beginning at sunrise.

Arugula lettuce sprouts.

Winter as a Time to Grow

One way to enjoy gardening during the winter is to invest in some auto-didacting, or self-learning, about how to become a better grower and gardener.  Recall what worked in last year's garden and what didn't.  Ask yourself what vegetable would you like to try to grow for the first time, what tool would have made a job easier, and what pests would you like to better control.  The Internet offers an endless supply of articles, blogs, podcasts, and free books on gardening and homesteading.

Ron Finley is a self-described guerrilla gardener who

promotes growing food in urban Los Angeles as a way

of educating and inspiring community.

His presentation has inspired me.

First Seedlings 2015

Our location in Maryland is part of hardiness zone 7a, meaning that normal winter low temperatures fall somewhere between 0 and 5 degrees F.  Starting seedlings indoors last year in February left us feeling as though we should have started earlier.  So, to get a jump on this year's growing season we started today, a moderate mid-January day with temperatures hovering above freezing.  Using the rack we built this time last year, we assembled 13 trays of spinach, lettuce, kale, Asian greens, mustard greens, Swiss chard, bok choi, and peas.  Once these plants are established we will move them into the hoop house or plant them directly in the garden under plastic row covers.  As space is freed on the rack we will start a round of cabbage, spinach, cauliflower, and the like.

The grow lights  have been improved by replacing

 their fixed hanging wires with chains.  This allows

 us to adjust the lights closer to the trays.