May 14
It's a glorious spring day. The sun shines brightly, the afternoon warmed to 85 degrees, and the birds play in the yard, twittering joyfully and looking for food. There's a new one I haven't seen before: brown with a bright white head, like a skullcap. I have no idea what kind he is, and I don't care enough to buy a book. I enjoy the birds, their seeming levity is contagious, but I'm more interested in their antics than their species.
By this morning, everything had dried out enough that I could spend some time working in the garden. There wasn't much to work on; our cabbages didn't survive being buried in the snow for several days. We've developed a routine over the past few years: I plant cabbages and kohlrabi in peat pellets on the window sill in February, then put the seedlings out in the garden and plant the other spring crops on April 15, after the worst of the winter weather has passed. Most years, that works pretty well. This year, we'll need to start over.
Today I planted cabbages and kohlrabi, spinach and lettuce, peapods and cilantro. Fortunately, and perhaps inexplicably, the onions survived the snow. I plant a few more of those, too, so we can have green onions to cook with over the next few weeks. It's too early to plant summer crops— we can expect frost for another couple of weeks yet.
Gardening has been one of the joys of moving out of the city. I'm not very good at it, but I've learned a lot. For example, I know that with the poor drainage here, if we want anything to grow, we need to put it in a raised bed. We line the bottom with mesh to keep the voles from eating our plants from underneath. We cover the newly-planted seeds until they sprout with 1/4 inch hardware cloth to keep the birds away. And if we want to eat the result, we surround it with chicken wire to keep the jackrabbits out. And of course we keep the garden fenced so the goats can't get in. Other than that, it's pretty simple.
The results, though humble, nevertheless gratify me. There's nothing like eating a tomato fresh from the garden. And the past couple of years, we've canned a pretty good salsa using our own tomatos, peppers, cilantro, and onions.
Comments