Topsy Turvy
What’s Blooming Now: Apple, peach, pear, bearded iris, lilac, azalea, clematis, trillium & the last of the tulips and daffodils
What We’re Harvesting Now: Lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, mustard, wild rocket, asparagus
What We’re Planting Now: Summer lettuce, onion, pea, potato, beet, carrot, chard, fennel
This has been a strange spring.
February was warm — highs near eighty for more than a week broke all the plants out of dormancy at once. Daffodils bloomed a month early, but temperatures were so warm the blooms didn’t last. Tulips struggled against the sudden chill of March, and I found myself cutting them rather than watch every bloom collapse on twenty-degree nights. The winter honeysuckle bloomed after the daffodils (I’ve never seen that before), and the forsythia and hellebores didn’t bloom at all. They went straight to leaf.
We’ve had three good harvests of asparagus so far. We’ve been eating lettuce, spinach, kale and mustard since February, when the plants that overwintered in the cold frame leapt into growth. They’re beginning to bolt, but we will still have a few weeks of harvest before then. By the time they’re really done, the summer lettuce will be ready to pick.
Broccoli, cabbage, and other hardy greens have been growing in the garden since March. Over the next few weeks, they’ll be joined by the more tender vegetables: cucumber, summer squash, beans, tomato, pepper. They’re all in the greenhouse now, waiting out the last week or two with nighttime temperatures in the low 40s. The last of the plants to go in the ground will be eggplant and sweet potato, which will join the others in mid-May.
This week we’ll plow up a large square in the front yard, where we will plant corn, pole bean, and pumpkins or winter squash — a traditional grouping known as the Three Sisters. Okra and sunflowers will join the field garden, as will Einkorn wheat, my big experimental crop for the year. All of these plants take up more room than we can easily accommodate in our terraced potager. They also comprise two of the biggest staple foods we eat: wheat and corn. If we could reach the point that we no longer needed to buy flour, pasta, cornmeal and grits, we would take a huge step toward more independence from the industrial agriculture system.
The new field garden is possible because we were finally able to remove the Bradford pear that dominated our front yard. Now the space is sunlit and open: perfect growing space.
After a snafu in which UPS delivered them to the wrong address not once, but twice (we ultimately had to drive to this other address to get them ourselves), we finally received six heirloom fruit trees: three apples, two peaches, and one pear. The pear and peaches have been planted above the potager’s third terrace, where they will receive full sun and well-drained soil, but will shade and stabilize the otherwise barren hill. The apples will round out the orchard in the back yard.
We’re finishing the new, permanent chicken coop this week. With scrap lumber, we will also finish a tri-part compost bin — a big step up from the impromptu pile we began five years ago. Both the old coop and compost pile were intended to be temporary. Perhaps you know how that goes.
Regardless of the temperatures, though, spring is certainly here. The sunlight is strong and warm. The world is alive in hundreds of shades of green, subtleties that you only see in spring.
The jewel garden, created last year in the back yard with the goal of having some plant looking its best every month of the year, is shining. Hostas have emerged from the ground in shimmering lime and glaucous blue-gray. Red-stemmed cornus shrubs have sprouted kelly green leaves. The clematis is shrouded in violet blooms with lime and white streaks on the back of each sepal. The native honeysuckle is awash in coral-red blooms that open into tiny trumpets with orange throats. The blade-like leaves of the bearded iris slice through the rest of the planting, their buds swelling with hints of canary yellow and indigo.
Oh, April.