Moving into spring 2021!

Here's a link to this article with photos.

Promises: spring is such a promise! Sun and 60° are tantalizing advertisements for summer. This year’s garden will be the best yet! The garlic is showing leaves, the cover crops are beginning to look full and green. Our January planning, on Zoom, is a plan for continual harvests of salad greens, abundant summer vegetables, flowers for bees and other beneficial insects. We will challenge our gardening skills trying out cabbage and broccoli. Too wet and cool for any actual planting, it is a great time for mapping and scheduling. The promise of a completed garden this growing season arrives with the final shipment of wall blocks for our bed edges.

Starts: The vegetable and flower seeds we started in late February, to grow protected inside, germinate quickly and begin growing well, still promising! So far we progress according to plan. Plant starts are like Goldilocks: just the right varieties for our region, needing just right conditions: not to cool, not too hot, not too shady or too sunny, and just enough but not too much water.

Soil: Cover crops have filled in by late February, by March some are starting to bloom. We’ve stewarded our soil by generously seeding cover crop mix in late summer and fall, and by February and bare spots are covered by leftover compost and grass cuttings. At our first transplanting day in late March, the cover crops and compost already on the beds requires only a sprinkling of composted chicken manure pellets under the lettuce and spinach transplants. The pea transplants should provide their own fertilizer through the symbiotic relationship with beneficial nitrogen fixing bacteria.
Our generous neighbor has pulled out the large stump and leveled the ground, so we begin measuring and building our final three beds. One of our generous volunteers brings us yards of wood chips, which we distribute on the paths between the beds.

 Compromises: As the actual garden season begins, it looks like we may have started the cosmos and nasturtiums a bit early. They germinate quickly and grow fast, maybe too fast! We still have a month before our frost free date, so if we plant them out they may not survive a late frost. We plant a few anyway, and save some for planting later. Our plan for following peas with tomatoes likely won't work, as the peas may still be producing just when we want to plant tomatoes. We adjust the plan to follow the peas with cucumbers, which can be planted as late as early to mid July. Tomato bed moved to where we had planned cucumbers. But the promises of winter and spring still hold, we just shift a bit to accommodate reality, the continual dance of gardeners.

Joy: Our first day of transplanting in late March is one with warm sun. Our regular group of volunteers are here, and a new volunteer too. It is such a pleasure to work in the sun with friendly companions! Here is one promise fulfilled, the joy of satisfying work shared. This companionable work generates energy for the challenges that will no doubt arise during this garden season.
Perhaps we will have more volunteers join us this season! We will need them for our abundant harvests for the Food Pantry still to come!

To continue following the Learning Garden on social media, join our page on MeWe.com or sign in to you accont there. We will no longer post to the page on Facebook.