Early June: It’s All In!
We are taking a look at how things are doing in the garden this week. Also, now that your veggies are all in, let’s explore permaculture with a feature film.
A Look at the Garden
We’ve planted all our veggies in the garden now and feel comfortable recommending that you can too. Here are some snapshots of how the plants are doing in our garden. Some are thriving, and others are facing some challenges—as you would expect. The variable weather and other conditions will favor some crops, while other crops will have issues. That’s just the way it is.
Our brassicas are growing slowly and getting a bit munched by slugs (left). This is often a problem when you have a good mulch layer where they can hide. It’s time for us to spread some Sluggo, an organic control for slugs, or to break out the beer. Placing a pie plate of beer near the plants overnight is a great way to catch and remove slugs, to knock the population down.
Our carrots have germinated nicely this year (right). We'll keep them well watered with the drip tape and mulch them when they get a bit bigger. Until then, it’s time for careful weeding.
The lettuce is hitting its stride now, and we are picking it nightly for dinner (left and center). We have already planted a new batch from seed so that when this patch is done, more will be coming. That’s succession planting!
Our beets and chard (right) are ready to be thinned to give each plant enough room to grow. Those thinnings will go into our salad tonight!
Our potatoes are poking up (left)! When they get a bit taller, we will hill them up to create deeper underground stems—because that’s where the spuds form.
Garlic (center) is planted in November, so with well-developed roots, it can leap ahead of everything else in the spring. Next month it will flower. We want all the energy to go to the bulb, not to make seeds, so we cut off the flowers and use them to make a delicious pesto. The flowers are called scapes. Look for them in the markets.
Our champagne currants are also starting to form (right). Next month we will be picking these strings of pearls and popping them in our mouths (below).
Dipping a Toe in Permaculture
Finally, we wrap up this week with a recommendation: as you tend your veggie garden, why not dream a bit about adding perennials or exploring permaculture in your life? To get the ideas flowing, here are two resources we tell new permaculture design clients to familiarize themselves with in preparation for our journey together:
Read Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway (available to buy from your local bookstore, or find an e-book from your local library). This is a wonderful introduction to the foundational ideas and skills of permaculture. Hemenway covers a lot of ground but explains topics in very easy-to-understand terms, making this an enjoyable read for novices and experts alike.
Watch INHABIT: A Permaculture Perspective. This truly inspirational film takes you all over the United States to see people putting permaculture into practice in many contexts and scales. It’s a wonderful chance to see what life on this planet could look like with a different lens.
We created INHABIT in 2015 to help envision what a more resilient world could look like. The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a global shutdown of our fragile economy, and it is a critical moment to reflect on the broken systems that run our world. The goal of this film is to inspire and empower people, and we hope by offering the film for free, it will have a greater effect.
—filmmakers Costa Boutsikaris and Emmett Brennan
Coming Up:
We will be looking at the best tools for weeding, creating a watering schedule—and what are those pretty yellow butterflies?
After next week, we will start focusing on the maintenance you should you be doing in the garden and the pests you should you be looking out for, as well as what you can make with all your amazing produce.
Garden Extras:
We bumped into this app for growing vegetables: From Seed to Spoon. The app keeps a plethora of information at your fingertips when you’re in the garden and not near your computer—which could save you a trip into the house to search for details about planting or caring for a particular plant. The app has great reviews and is free (at the time we’re writing this), so we thought we would pass it on.
