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Category Archives: seasonality
Snow babies
Gardener’s spring nightmare: it snows. That’s what happened. After days of rain, snow flurries and then snow covering all those baby seedlings. Turns out the bed of snow actually saved the seedlings and seeds by insulating them from the 20 … Continue reading
Posted in seasonality, seed starting
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Plant after final frost
Seed packets always say to plant after the danger of the final frost. But when is that exactly? Despite the snow flurries and cold, frosty mornings, the ground is sufficiently warm, and the seeds adequately prepared to germinate and sprout. … Continue reading
Posted in planting, seasonality, seed starting
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What’s up, Doc?
Last year, spring was five to six weeks slow. Spring 2016 seems to be coming more quickly than last. As you may recall from earlier posts, I plant by soil temperature, not length of day. This spring the soil is already … Continue reading
Posted in seasonality, seed starting
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This year’s garlic
This year, the garlic is slow to mature and be harvested. Usually I’m harvesting my garlic around the 4th of July but this year it’s not ripe yet for harvest and curing. Perhaps it’s the long, cool spring we’ve had. … Continue reading
Posted in garlic, seasonality
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What’s up and coming
Cucumbers are flowering and growing wildly up the trellis. Soon there will be many varieties of cucumbers to relish. Bush beans (here) and pole beans are flowering. Soon there will be many fillet beans to … Continue reading
Posted in cucumber, eggplant, green beans, seasonality
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Spring salads
These cool, spring days are prolonging the salad greens. Lovely, tender spinach for omelettes and lettuces with herb leaves for salad. One client told me she’s serving her teenage daughters microgreen salad sprinkled with chive and borage flowers! Beautiful, nutritious … Continue reading
Posted in asian greens, lettuce, sage, seasonality, spinach
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What’s up, part two
With the rain and warm sunshine, seedlings and seeds are growing strong. Each day you can see huge growth as asparagus quadruple size, carpets of greens spring forth, soil blocks put out new leaves and fruit trees flower. … Continue reading
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“It’s May, it’s May, the lusty month of May . . .”
Lyrics from Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot, of course. But apropos edible gardens too. All the tiny seeds planted and watered these past weeks are beginning to poke out of the soil and grow. The fruit trees are in blossom. Bees are … Continue reading
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And we give thanks
On Thanksgiving, my dear friend Sam Guard shared this grace written by his father Sam Sr. My friend’s father was an agricultural writer and radio host here in Chicago.
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