Spring Vegetable Garden

This has been a crazy spring weather-wise...snow in April, lots of hail, too cold, too wet. We finally got some warm weather last week, but that just fried the tender new foliage on many of our plants.

We garden very intensively in small raised beds, the timing of each crop is important...I thought over the past three years I had gotten a handle on when each crop needed to be planted, I had high hopes for the 2008 vegetable harvest. Well, Mother Nature has taken me down a few notches! We need to plant our tomatoes no later than two weeks from today in order to harvest ripe tomatoes and get the fall crops planted before it gets too cold. Before we can plant the tomatoes we need to harvest the lettuce and peas, neither of which are ready. Please be sunny for the next two weeks!

We planted pea seeds on February 5th. Two varieties Super Sugar Snap and Sugar Pop Snap Peas Until a few days ago I couldn't tell the difference between the two, both had about a 75 percent germination rate, both were the same size, and both were healthy. Now I see a BIG difference: the Sugar Pop (from New Dimension Seeds) has peas that will be ready to harvest in a few days! There are flowers on the Super Sugar Snap (from Ed Hume Seeds), but no peas. Once they both have peas we will do a taste comparison.

Berry and Basil noticed that some of the turnips had flowered and took that as their cue to harvest green for themselves...they only like the crunchy rib of the leaf, the rest is discarded...picky dogs!The seeds started for my fathers garden are growing well, now we just need a few dry days to till and plant. The community garden is going to be difficult...many of the surrounding plots are FULL of weeds and the soil is full of weed seeds; I hope a good layer of mulch will keep the weeds manageable.