Mother's Day in the Gardens

Lots of pictures to share today! We spent the entire day in the garden on Sunday. Dave and I now have plots spread around the city: one at Quann Community Garden near our house, one in our way-too-shady-backyard, and a new one on East Main Street across from our other brother's and sister in law's house. We visited them all on Sunday as you will see.....

First we headed out to Quann Community Garden to see how our little 10x10 half plot was doing. We found it quite mucky from recent rain, and starting to get a little overgrown with weeds, but it's small enough that none of that was too big a challenge.

You can see the potatoes we planted two weeks ago are coming up nicely! We're planning on planting almost the entire plot in potatoes, minus the little asparagus patch and some lettuce that I transplanted. The first row is red potatoes that we planted two weeks ago, then on Sunday we planted another row of fingerling potatoes. We'll come in in a few weeks and do one more row I think....

The red potatoes are coming up beautifully!

Here are the little lettuce transplants I put it. These were started indoors a few weeks ago....

Quann Garden provided us with a bale of straw that we used to mulch in the potatoes.

After working our little plot, I wandered around and looked at some of the other plots. Some of them are really nice, others haven't been touched yet this season. I guess everyone is on a slightly different schedule.

This very large plot is just immaculate. There are a lot of Hmong and Hispanic gardeners at Quann who really know what they're doing!

The strawberries in another plot were blossoming! It won't be long now - I am so ready for berry season!

This garden had an extraordinary amount of peas. I'm guessing they're shelling peas - I really can't imagine a family eating this many sugar snaps!


This is the spot we cleaned out on East Main Street, across town. It's about 16x16 - bigger than the Quann plot. It took a fair amount of work to get it looking like you see above, but nothing seems too bad after working full time on a farm! My plan is to grow corn, beans, and squash there in a companion planting - the beans grow up the corn like a trellis and fix nitrogen.....next weekend I'll come in and plant it.

Right across the path I noticed a lot of dill coming up - someone must have had a dill plant there last year. I saved most of it - I figure it will make excellent baby dill greens!

This is my brother Ben and sister in law Erica's plot (my mom has part ownership too since she helps take care of it and lives about a block away). It's just one plot down from the spot that Dave and I cleared.

Ben and Erica's new puppy, Olive, was excited to help with all the gardening! She loved chewing on the weeds.

Here is mom picking stinging nettles for dinner (yes, my family is just crazy enough to eat nettles!). They're a great source of iron.....and a good spring green. Just be careful not to touch them!

When we were all done in the garden, we trooped over to mom's house for dinner. I made salad with radishes and lettuce mix from the farm, plus arugula and pea shoots from my backyard. I sprinkled some violets on top for color - how pretty!

We also grilled a chicken. Mom made a stuffing with bread crumbs, the giblets from the chicken, asparagus, and chives. I was a little worried that a stuffed chicken would remind me too much of autumn meals, but the asparagus and chives really helped spring it up a little.

Oh, and don't forget our backyard garden! I took the plastic off our cold frame last weekend, and things have been growing like crazy. The arugula is especially doing well - much better than the other things I planted.....We'll have to eat it soon before it's too big!

The spinach is also starting to do well finally.

I moved all my remaining seedlings outside, in preparation for planting next weekend. The squash is doing OK, although there's definitely some yellow leaves. Hopefully it'll get over it once it gets in the ground.

Phew! Busy times!
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