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Tag Archives: shallots

3 weeks after planting, and everything’s going wild

27 Mar

It’s already so warm that everything’s starting to bolt — my spinach leaves are getting unworthy of being eaten raw, I’m seeing the little broccoli-looking florets on some of my greens (like mizuna), and the lettuce is looking similarly bothered by this early, fast spring.

Y’all come by and pick a bag (or ten) of greens — they’re getting out of hand!

Mizuna is now taller than my 3 year old

Garlic coming up

 

 

 

 

All the seeds and sets I planted back on March 7th have come up in full force.  We’ve had ample rain, warmth and sun to coax everything up.

Beets and snow peas are great seeds for kids to help with the planting -- they are big and easy to handle

Snow peas

Garlic and radishes

Yum, shallots

Radishes

And no frosts or freezes to kill everything back — yet.  I just keep waiting for a weather report calling for a late-season blizzard or something (wasn’t Asheville’s Great Blizzard of ’96 at the end of March??)

If that does happen, I can cover 4 of my raised beds, but there is so much in the yard that we’d need to buy truckloads of plastic sheeting to cover all the trees and shrubs that are already flowering.

So while this unseasonably warm weather is unsettling (I keep thinking of flooded islands, melting ice caps) now I’m kind of hoping it stays this way — at least for my garden’s sake!

Raspberry canes

Blueberry blossoms

Jonafree apple blossom

Jonafree apple blossom

Honeycrisp apple blossom

 
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Posted by on March 27, 2012 in front yard farm, Gardening, kids gardening, organic vegetables, parenting, raised bed gardening, Uncategorized

 

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Veggies to plant in early spring in WNC

10 Mar

One of my biggest challenges in gardening in raised beds is finding enough room for everything I want to plant.

Right now one of my 6 beds is full of spinach, carrots, cress, mizuna and mache — I planted all from seed back in the fall, and our mild winter and early warm spring days have blessed us with lots of big green salads lately.

The other beds have random plantings like a couple rows of spinach, red russian kale, beets and leeks that overwintered.

I’ve been thinning out the leeks and transplanting them around the end of the bed they’re in.

I have a hard time with thinning out plants.  It’s a gardening angst I’ve realized about myself over the years.

This, of course, adds to my problem of not enough room in the beds, as I’d rather re-plant than chuck them….

Along my fence, I planted a row of snow peas a few weeks ago. They’ve not sprouted yet, but the radish, arugula, and beet seeds I planted are starting to pop through:


And I’ve also recently planted garlic, red onions, and shallots.

Sow True Seed, Reems Creek Nursery, Jesse Israel’s, N. Asheville Ace Hardware all have cool-weather veggie starts too.  I got cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce (buttercrunch and romaine) and dinosaur kale starts for my beds from these places.

The cauliflower starts got a little frostburned one night last week when it got into the mid-20s but I think they’re going to be OK.

Sow True Seed has a great planting guide you can pick up at their downtown store.  It is a nice reference for what -and when — to plant right here in WNC.

Planting red onions

 
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Posted by on March 10, 2012 in corn salad, front yard farm, Gardening, mache, organic vegetables, raised bed gardening, Uncategorized

 

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