When It Rains, Things Grow

This would seem obvious enough, that bit about the rain making things grow. But when you haven't had much rain, it can be shocking how fast things will shoot up after just one good day of rain (which we had yesterday). The most obvious beneficiary is our salad cold frame:


It's just about bursting at the seams with lettuces and spinach, and the radishes are big enough now that they need to be pulled and kept in the fridge so they don't get overgrown and terrible. You can compare all this growth to a photo from just a week and a half ago if you don't believe me.

Our next section of salad greens and cool weather crops has all come up with the rain as well:


This looks to be good timing, as it should be ready to eat when we've picked over all the good stuff in the cold frame from the previous photo. This is one succession planting of what we've been calling our "cool season rows." It is, from left to right: radishes, carrots, lettuce, beets, swiss chard, bok choy, spinach, radicchio, and arugula. 

Other cool season crops that are happy for the rain:


Our broccoli looks like it's gotten over the hardening off mess-up and transplant shock. Ditto for the cabbage, but at this point in their growth broccoli and cabbage look about the same, so I didn't bother with a photo of each.

Two more things that have finally poked through the earth after the rain:


That's an asparagus spear! I didn't expect these to be up so soon after planting the roots, but here they are, poking up out of the earth. We can't eat them this year, but they are looking great.


Last but not least are the potatoes. These were planted back at the end of March, so we've been waiting for a while to see them. Not all of them are up yet, but there are more every day. 

Going outside today after a good soaking rain felt like seeing things anew after being away for awhile. Everything was so green and big and different. Things really do grow over night sometimes, and if you open your eyes, you can see changes every day out in the garden.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w...
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin...
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel...
Read more