Vegetable gardening musings

I'm all about growing what I can in my small vegetable garden beds. Frankly, we can barely keep up eating (currently) with what I produce in the small front beds and the one down below.

I'm harvesting kale, swiss chard, sugar snap peas, turnip greens, leeks and garlic.  Uh, there's only two of us.

front vegetable beds

So, calls for more edibles in public landscapes are appealing, but I'm still thinking and musing about this, as I'm volunteering in one community garden and picking up eggs from another (with apologies that I don't need more greens, no matter how lovely.)

It's great to encourage folks to grow more of their own vegetables.  I've been doing this for close two decades, now, when I think about it.

Hooray for gardens of all sizes, I'm thinking, and "re-skilling" with knowledge of how to grow vegetables, too.

But perhaps what we really need is encouragement (and perhaps teaching) for folks to cook vegetables and eat them? 

I think you need to be a cook to enjoy growing vegetables, as they're so delicious straight from the garden (or from the farmer's market or community garden).

But they do require prepping, cleaning, and chopping, as well as cooking.

I'm enjoying the fresh sugar snap peas from my garden, at the moment (it's a good thing to have them because of a cool spring!)

 The nutrient levels in my beds came back high (not surprisingly); whether there are micro-nutrient issues, not examined.  So that's all good.  Now, I've replanted beans, sowed squash, tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers are in place.

Raised bed vegetable gardening

I've had these raised beds in the mountains for quite awhile now - about 6 years.  Here was a reflection about them. 

They were originally filled with commercial compost (from the Asheville Mulch Yard), a locally created compost with veggie waste from the WNC Farmer's Market probably mixed with manures and turned frequently to compost.  It was quite a light "compost" mix.

So over the years, I've added mushroom compost, "garden soil," Espoma organic fertilizer, Black Kow, Black Hen, Ace's cow manure compost, as well as leftover Epsom salts, liquified ancient calcium tablets, fish emulsion, etc.

So now I'm suddenly thinking about micronutrients -- geez, has all of this compost provided enough?

Why aren't my plants gigantic like the ones in the community gardens that I'm associated with?  Is it that I'm planting them too closely, or just that I'm harvesting baby leaves as soon as I can, and planting intensively?

Are we getting enough iodine in our vegetables,  I'm also questioning?  Do I need to add some sort of kelp mixture to my amendments?

Hrrmph.

We still have as many greens as we can eat right now, with lots of veggies to come, not to mention the giant leaves of the community garden veggies, too, purchased with farmstand credits or volunteer/plant donation perks.  Yikes.

Intensively managed raised vegetable beds

I'm volunteering in a large neighborhood community garden (managed under a non-profit umbrella) that's planted with long traditional raised beds in rows.

It's productive, scarily so (I don't know who going to harvest all of the greens, etc., not to mention the tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes to come).

Part of the produce serves the Kitchen Ready project of Go Opportunities, but there's a lot more than they can use, and we're quickly getting into a harvest phase for greens and sugar snap peas.  And the small group of folks that seems to be part of the second year of this project (my friend and I are new this year) aren't a large group -- not sure where all of this will go!  Hopefully, the neighborhood folks will help themselves, as this garden is part of a community center landscape, near a housing area for the City of Asheville.

It's making me thankful for the discipline of my small raised bed vegetable gardens.  I don't have unlimited space, so I swap things out, plant closely (my goal is baby greens, not giant ones, for spring).  I just harvested all of the arugula and much of the turnips, as well as much of the last spinach.

It's time for summer crops to take hold.  I've moved around transplants of Swiss chard; hopefully as a more-heat-tolerant green, it'll keep coming.

There are pole beans coming up under the sugar snap peas, a dance to come.  Hopefully there will be a few peas before it's too hot for their flowers!

I've loved having the wire cloches from Gardening Supply -- they've definitely deterred the cabbage white butterfly caterpillar impact on my baby kales and other coles... They (the cloches) were pricey, but worth it.