Mid-May Progress Report

The further we get into May, the more our garden really looks like a garden. Lots of seedlings are filling out, and it feels like we are on the verge of having more menu choices than just lettuce by the time June gets here. A look at where things stand right now:

Our cabbages are doing quite well. The largest ones are starting to form small heads — well, their inner leaves are curling up to start that process, anyway. Not quite all of them survived, but most are looking sturdy enough. I hate to jinx it, but cabbage loopers don't look to be a major issue for us so far this spring.

Most of the broccoli is also doing well, and the biggest seem almost ready to send up their central stalks for the heads of broccoli. A few are still tiny because they were started from seed to replace lost seedlings, but if they make it without bolting in the heat, we'll have a bit of an (unintentionally) staggered harvest.

Here is our allium bed. To the right, our garlic is going strong. We only lost 3 or 4 over the winter, and the rest are nice and big. Harder to see are the onions and leeks. Leeks are in the hoizontal section across the front, and are still quite tiny. They are very hard to see because their long leaves are still pretty thin. You can get a sense of how small they still are by looking at the one near the back edge of that section. The onions are to the left and are also still difficult to see. We lost many (maybe 1/3?) of the seedlings we set out, but the rest seem ok. I'm not at all sure how these will fare, and we've been having a lot of trouble with crabgrass germinating in this bed. This is our own fault for not being more on top of it last summer, and it's very hard to clear it out of our closely-planted onions. I hope didn't damage the onions with my little garden fork as I worked out the worst patches of weeds over the weekend.

One of the best parts of planting seeds in the garden is seeing the geometric patterns emerge as the plants do. Our nice neat rows of salad greens are looking all orderly and clean now that the plants are up.

Finally, our corn is getting a good start as well. A close look shows that we have planted them in succession: the larger ones in the rear square are two weeks older than the ones in the center stretch, and then the foreground looks empty because it has just been sown. It's all pretty tiny right now, but in another month we should be getting close to eating corn instead of just looking at it!