Author: silver cloud

Spring in the Garden

Green is the color of spring.  At ALM we keep our box program going year-round, our customers get a good sense of the movement of the seasons by the food that shows up in their box each week.  Right now the salad and braising greens are growing strong (still mostly over-wintered greens), the brassicacea’s (kale, cabbage, br.sprouts, purple sprouting brocolli, etc) are making florets, which are highly nutritious and can be cooked like broccoli.  The root vegetables are on their way out, they will be starting to raise up flower stalks to make seed, which compromises their flavour.  If you still have over-wintered carrots, parsnips, leeks, etc in the garden it is time to eat them up.  We have been harvesting rhubarb for the last 3 weeks, the first dessert crop of spring.  
It is a busy time at the farm right now.  We have countless tomatoes that we have been babying along since Feb, they are starting to get big and are becoming more demanding in terms of water and nutrition.  We have planted our first tomatoes into whatever ground we had ready in our greenhouses.  This will continue into May as space becomes available.  We also have lots of lettuce, kale, and other seedlings that want transplanting into the ground.  This wet weather has made it difficult to get onto the soil to till and so we are ready and waiting for our window to till and get beds prepped to seed and transplant.  
Now is the time to start thinking about the heat loving crops.  We are choosing and prepping beds for corn, beans, cukes and squash right now.  We will plant them out by early May to get a jump on the season.  Often we get beds prepped and then cover them with old greenhouse plastic to help warm the soil before we plant the crop.  Both beans and corn will not germinate in the soil if it is too cold, but instead rot.  
Seed into trays/pots to transplant: lettuces, chard, kales, brocolli, cauliflower, cabbage, basil, green onions.
Direct seed outside: potatoes, peas, spinach, radish, carrots, beets, runner beans, parsnips.