The seasons first SFG workshop

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sfg workshop prep 330It’s always a little tricky to see how early you can be ready to pull off one of these square foot garden workshops. Today was perfect-about 60 degrees, even warmer as we finished, and sunny. To fit one in by the end of March is pretty good for us. I spend 3 hours on this workshop and by the time we’re done, people leave with a small gift, and they know everything to have a great square foot garden. All the advanced techniques are discussed and shown, along with a few “tasty” treats along the way. I was lucky enough to have 3 suckers from a tomato plant that I’m growing. I simply cut it out and rooted it in one of my potmaker cups and gave them away. This was a Sun Gold cherry tomato plant-one of the sweetest tomatoes you’ll ever taste. I think they all got to taste arugula, mizuna, tatsoi, and minutina. Some of them were pleasantly surprised by the flavor of these lesser known salad greens. We also had someone who wasn’t ready for the arugula pepper taste-when you grow it in cooler weather it tastes strikingly different that those varieties that have been grown in warmer soil. If you’re interested in learning more about these workshops, feel free to contact me. All participants have already attended a 90-120 minute introductory class so we don’t have to waste a lot of time answering questions about content that they’ve already learned. I was able to have an unbelievably great garden last year. I think this year it will be even better-you never stop learning how to do things.

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Mizuna in the square foot garden

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mizunaHere’s a little something for you-an Asian green called mizuna. If you’ve never grown it in a SFG-and I don’t know anybody that has around my neck of the woods, it’s a wonderfully lemon tasting green to add with all your other salad greens. You’ll taste something different but won’t be able to put your finger on it. I planted this successfully, from seed, in the coldest winter we’ve had in over 5 decades. We’ve actually been picking at it a little bit already. Based on how’s it’s grown I think the best spacing would be what you see here-9 per square. These will get larger so I think the 16 plants per square would be too close. I just can’t believe it’s grown this well-proving the point that if you plant the right kind of crops and match it to the right season you can probably grow all year long. Here in zone 6 that takes a little extra work, but I can tell you, it’s well worth it. Nothing like going out to the garden, uncovering a layer, and snipping off some freshly harvested salad greens. We’ve had some remarkable salads almost all winter long.

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Revving up your square foot gardens

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space 0313We had our 2nd day over 60 today and my garden is really starting to grow. I got home from work today and inspected my gardens. It was dry-even though it got a good watering this morning. This happened because of the wind-which really dries your soil out. I’ve come to learn just by looking at the color of the soil if it needs more watering. I think I’ll take a video of this so that I can show you what I mean. So I re-watered and planted a few things. Here’s a list of the items I’ve got growing at this time: 6 different kinds of lettuce, radicchio, arugula, spinach, swiss chard, radishes, pac choi, carrots, kale, mache, cilantro, parsley, tomatoes, brussel sprouts, mizuna, kohlrabi, and tatsoi. Everything is looking very good at this point. I’ve tasted the baby leaves of mizuna, arugula, and tatsoi and they are outstanding. It’s a lot different than lettuce, but it adds quite a bit of texture and flavor. You can see how nicely things are starting to fill in by this picture. This is spinach-and everybody discovers what variety is their favorite. “Space” is ours-the taste is excellent and like all spinach, is easy to grow. I’m still amazed at the prices some of these organic stores are charging for produce and veggies. Learn how to do it for yourself and save the big bucks at the checkout stand. You can learn how to grow a great garden with many different methods, but you won’t find one as simple as the square foot garden method.

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Composting through winter

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winter compostI probably should’ve put this post in before winter started. I live in zone 6 and we’ve had a hard winter. Lots of snow, cold, below zero temperatures, little sun, etc. Throughout the winter I continually add kitchen scraps to my compost bins . One of the tricks to having compost early in a zone such as ours is to not water your compost at the end of the last season. When you do that and have the kind of winter that we’ve had, your compost pile will be frozen solid. It’ll eventually melt, but it’ll take a lot longer to be able to work the pile. By not watering-in your compost additions the previous fall, your pile won’t be frozen and it’ll look like this. Totally workable. You can still chop things up and mix things around. It won’t be doing any true composting during this time but the minute the weather start to change and you start getting sun and warmer temps, your compost can start to be worked. If you had dumped water on it last year you wouldn’t be able to do that for several more weeks. Just a little trick that I do so that I can some finished compost a little earlier.

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Fun stuff in the garden

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tatsoi and eliteWent out earlier this morning, pulled off the floating row cover and looked at my plants after a 12 degree low last night.  I wasn’t sure what kind of damage I would find to my plants but everything looks really good.  That’s tatsoi on the left-a great tasting Asian leaf for salads or even better for stir-fries.  On the right is Simpson Elite-a standard lettuce we enjoy growing because of its taste and simpleness to grow.  After this evening we will have low temperatures in the mid 20’s for the next 10 days.  It looks like spring is on it’s way.  And by the time my friendly neighbors have their gardens dry enough to rototill-which I never have to do-we’ll be well into eating what we’ve been growing.  Lots of fun-the easy way-square foot gardening.

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