I can’t (and also I can…) believe I didn’t post again after the beginning of May when I transplanted my spring transplants! I do want to make a record of what did and didn’t work last season (and what was just enjoyable!) before getting into the whirlwind of a new growing year, so I hope this post will serve as a visual recap. Ok, buckle up…
New projects in Spring 2022:
Winter sowing
Updates to my seed starting equipment
Garlic
Electric fencing
Perennials: asparagus and strawberries
Sidewalk flowers
In-person plant sale
Weed barrier fabric
End caps for my home raised beds
New flowers: calendula, poppies, chamomile
Winter Sowing and a Simple Greenhouse
I tried out winter sowing some of my hardy and semi-hardy annual flower seeds. Their germination was slow - the ones I sowed inside under lights 2 months later soon caught up to them, but it was still cool to see what I could do without grow lights during that antsy mid-January time when it’s otherwise too early to do much else.
These trays of flowers and lettuce were stuck out in the snow when my pop-up greenhouse tipped over from a winter storm! I can’t believe that lettuce fared so well - Crisp Mint was the variety of Romaine that held up well through the cold!
Go lettuce, go! No wonder it’s so hard to grow lettuce through the summer
I had to troubleshoot the location for my pop-up greenhouse - at first it was too exposed to wind and got blown over in a snow storm, then once I stabilized it, it was still getting too much afternoon sun, so we settled on a wall where it only gets sun through about midday to keep from overheating (even in the winter!). Even in that protected spot (in the picture) it got super hot and needed to be vented (which would have been easier to do without chickens in the yard)
At home, we continued the early spring tradition of picking young flower buds off of our redbud tree and pickling them
Overwintering Garlic
Cozy garlic (with puffy cloud of weeds!) bed
We had two mini-rows of garlic - both hardneck varieties that gave us garlic scapes! - that we mulched with straw and otherwise ended up with an unintentional mulch of spring chickweed and henbit. The garlic bulbs themselves were kind of a bust - all but about a dozen were pretty infested by white rot, which either came in with the bulbs from the seed company I bought them from, or was waiting dormant in the soil (unlikely, since this has never been a veggie garden before)
Don’t worry, I did end up weeding the bed after a “nap”
Hardneck garlic payout: scapes!
Oh, and some actual garlic bulbs
New Seed Starting Space
One big change I made in mid-Spring that set me up well for the future was taking the plunge and buying a grow light rack with UV bulbs. In the picture above you can see what my seed starting set up had been since 2020: one fluorescent shop light over a table, and trying to get as many plants under that single set of 4 bulbs as possible. I had to trade off getting the light as close to the plants as possible in favor of having the lights higher and available to more trays - not ideal! You can see the tray in the back there up on a tupperwear bin as a way to get those new germinators closer to the light.
Hooray! 3 layers of lights, holding a total of six 1020 trays. Everything performed better under the UV light with exception of peppers that missed the fluorescent lights’ extra heat. Still busting out of that space at night when I brought the larger tomato plants in from hardening off outside.
Making the Leap from Plant Donations to Plant Sales
I loved hosting my first in-person plant sale in late April. In 2020 and 2021, I had grown plants to barter with friends (including in 2020 trading for craft supplies in early April fo 2020 when my preschool kids were stuck home quarantining and Amazon was backordered on so many staples for weeks on end. It had been great fun to swap tomato plants for canisters of glitter and dollar tree craft kits…
…and it was also fun to have my friends come and and support me in my work by paying for plants that would go on to feed them at their homes!
We still had a bunch of plants available to donate too, so I looked into some new avenues for plant drops.
The kids and I attended our first RVA Gardening Facebook group meet up, where we swapped seeds and plants with other Richmond growers at the Sankofa Community Orchard
And we dropped a mix of starts at the Juvenile Detention center in Chesterfield where the staff were reinvesting in the greenhouse and raised bed gardens there. I had heard about the need through the same RVA Gardening Facebook group, where I also learned that the kids there at the detention center would get to grow veggies to be made into meals for the homeless.
Better Weed Suppression…
Adding a perimeter of weed barrier fabric really made mowing a lot easier, but also just finally helped the place look like a true, intentional garden plot. I had bought enough to cover the paths as well, but we were doing a better job at using the stirrup hoe to keep weeds down in the paths so we decided to skip adding anything additional.
…and the need for better Pest Prevention
We soaked and sowed snap peas on the last day of February, which was great timing - but we never got our crop as expected, because they were a big target of groundhogs in the area. I made a quick emergency purchase of electric fencing in early June to keep from losing the rest of our spring progress and it absolutely saved our summer!
I can’t believe we spent the first 12 months of the garden without any kind of protection like this! The garden itself is surrounded by wooden fencing to prevent deer, but there are groundhogs living 20 feet away in the barn, so looking back at old pictures pre-electric fencing is like looking at an open feast spread for the taking.
Carrying Peas into Late Spring
Meanwhile, at home we had a really nice pea year! I tried out putting a frost blanket over our trellis where the peas were growing in hopes of shading out the plants enough at the late spring and it bought us an extra week or two!
We had a good amount of snap peas up to the end of May (this photo is from May 27)
Intentional Spaces for Flowers at Home
At home, Nate and used one half of a galvanized fire pit ring on each end of our middle raised bed to give me a little more flower growing space specifically for herbs and flowers. Here’s the transplants on May 3rd (dill, asters and strawflower)
Here’s the endocarp on the opposite at the end of May: Tulsi basil, chamomile, dwarf sunflower and nigella.
…And Unintentional Space for Flowers
It took a while for us to realize that the “weeds” growing at the back door to the bagel shop (where the fallen seeds are swept out from the oven) were breadseed poppies! I got weeks of enjoyment over that trick - that these discarded seeds could grow up in the sandy cracks in the poorly draining sidewalk.
2nd Year Rhubarb
At home I had planted a rhubarb crown in the spring of 2021, so I was happy to see it return in early spring 2022.
The rhubarb plant tried to flower several times, which I wasn’t expecting! I think the spring temps were higher than it liked.
We did get a modest harvest for year 2! I was careful not to cut many stems because I had lost a plant a couple years ago when it didn’t have enough energy going into the winter. I left 2/3 of the stems to be safe.
Adding Perennials to the Goat Field Garden
In mid-March we had a nice weather day for planting, so we pulled back some tarp that had been sitting on top of terminated oat/pea cover crop through the winter and prepared the soil for strawberry, rhubarb and asparagus crowns.
I had bought both June-bearing and ever-bearing strawberry plants and decided to put the June-bearing ones out here where I can come harvest a big batch all at once—saving the ever-bearing ones for home we we can harvest regularly, here and there.
Does this scraggly root bear any resemblance to it’s future fruit, the asparagus shoot??
This was the most digging we’ve done, with rhubarb needing a 12”x 12” hole per plant and asparagus needing an 8” wide, deep trench.
Prepping for spring was demanding across the board - the easiest to handle being the surface annual weeds, and the toughest being these deeply taprooted burdock that popped up (again) everywhere and needed to be deeply dug to keep from just snapping the woody root partway.
Spring is for Tomato Prep
This photo from April 2nd shows the black silage tarp on top of terminated winter rye, which we had mowed down right before covering. This would be our future tomato row.
My dad added two widths of cattle panel laid out horizontally to serve as our trellis, with a total of 3 large posts down the row. We were able to put in 18 tomato plants at 2’ spacing. Luckily they were left pretty well alone by the groundhogs (this was 6 weeks before we ended up adding a perimeter of electric fencing!) I think largely due to the marigolds I had planted on the reverse side of the tomato plant trellis.
A stretch to include this in the Spring recap, but here we were in late June with a full tress of Sungolds!
Other highlights of the Spring
At home: Red Russian kale, broccoli, sumo long cucumbers, beets, early green beans, calendula and nigella blooms
Some pride-inducing over-wintered leeks! Hefty!
Poppies and chamomile at the top of the spring pea row
A Danish Flag poppy
A went ahead and bought a flat of marigolds in May and it was so nice to have something already boldly flowering among all the green spring growth.
Easter egg radishes - like candy from underground!
