A Greens Garden
With so much talk about the cost of vegetables that are trucked across our country, the pollution caused by all that trucking, and the wonderful freshness of locally grown vegetables, I am wondering how many people might be inspired to begin a vegetable garden this year.
Even a novice gardener can be successful with a small garden. My first vegetable garden was in the tiny tiny side yard of our house on Grinnell Street. I barely knew what I was doing, but being able to pick my own lettuce, beans and broccoli was fun and satisfying. I was so encouraged that there has been no looking back since that day.
While new gardeners should grow the things they most like to eat, I think a salad garden is an excellent way to start.
The beginning of any vegetable garden is to choose a sunny spot that will get at least 6 hours of sun. Avoid places where the rain collects. Good drainage is important. Then clear your site, dig it, and incorporate a good helping of compost. Happily, it is now easy to buy a yard or a truckload of compost locally from Bear Path Farm or from Martin’s Farm.
Then comes the hard part, choosing just a few greens from the huge variety that is now available. In my Johnny’s Selected Seed catalog alone (www.Johnnyseeds.com) there are eight pages of lettuces and lettuce mixes, like the familiar leaf lettuces including Black Seeded Simpson and Red Sails, but also new varieties like Blackhawk and Marimba with wonderful deep coloring. There are green oakleafs, baby oakleafs, and red oakleafs, then romaines in green and red, butterheads which I love, summer crisps, and a whole range of salad mixes that enable you to have a gourmet salad with several types of lettuce and other greens, from one packet of seeds.
You can also get 50 types of other greens from amaranth to beets, chard, mustard, raidsh, and tatsoi that can been grown and eaten while they are tiny and extremely nutritious and delicious seedlings. Some of these micro-greens are ready to eat in as little as 10 days. They can be scattered into a bowl of conventional sized greens for an extra snap of flavor and an extra helping of vitamins. Newly sprouted greens have more nutrition per ounce than mature greens.
You can also make a salad more interesting by adding Asian greens like Red Komatsuna. Like many of these exotic and tasty greens, they can be harvested in 21 days as a baby green, or at 35 days when it has reached full size. This is a green that is even a darker red when planted in the summer for fall harvest. If we can only have a small garden, we should be thinking about succession planting to keep the garden producing as much as possible.
And of course, there is always spinach. Spinach and lettuce are cool weather crops and can be planted as soon as the soil can be worked. Don’t try to plant when the soil is too wet.
Don’t forget that garden greens can climb. Peas are also a cool weather crop and since they grow up on supports, they take almost no room in a new small garden. I love sugar snap peas because of the taste, and the fact that I can eat the pod as well as the pea.
A new development this year is peas with extra sugar content. Like the super sweet corn varieties that maintain their sweetness longer after picking, so do peas like Eclipse. They are worth a try.
This is another reason these greens are a good choice for the novice gardener. They can be planted early in the season when it is cool, but when enthusiasm is running hot, and there is a fast return. You could not ask for more encouragement.
Today, February 2, is Groundhog Day and we’ll all be waiting to see what he has to say about the rapid, or slow arrival of spring. There is no doubt that whatever his verdict, February is a month when gardeners are getting real itchy. There are ways to scratch this itch enjoyably.
Melinda McCreven, an inadvertent seed saver courtesy of her compost pile and local squirrels, is inviting all gardeners, novice and expert, to a seed swap at Green Fields Market on Main Street on Saturday, February 16th from 2pm-5pm, in the upstairs community room. These do not need to be seeds you have saved yourself and both vegetable and flowers seeds will be swapped. You’ll be able to meet other gardeners and “swap lies” as my old neighbor used to say, as well as seeds while you speculate about the season ahead. This event is free and open to all.
For those who need to see things growing and flowering right away there is the Amherst Orchid Society Show on Saturday and Sunday, February 23 and 24, 2008 at Smith Vocational School, Locust Street in Northampton. The hours are 9 AM to 5 PM on Saturday and 10 AM top 4 PM on Sunday. Admission is $3 per person.
If you want more information about the Amherst Orchid Society you can log on to http://www.larchhillorchids.com/newsletter.html, a website that is maintained by one of the members, Bill Hutchinson.
February 2, 2008