Spring gardening

This year we have three garden plots: the long bed in the backyard (maybe 20'x4'), a private plot in the Fox St. community garden (oh, let's say 15'x4'), and after almost two years on a waiting list, a bed in the city garden at Druid Hill Park (a whopping 15'x10'). This gives us a grand total of almost 300 sq.ft., just you know, spread out a bit. Come to think of it, we are also sharing some space at Mavid's too (home to some revolting number of peas and beets at the moment). So four. Four gardens. Seems excessive, but more would be fun.

In preparation for all of this space, we splurged on seeds from Landreth's, including at least four kinds of tomato, and three types of beans, three or four types of squash, three types of cucumber (who knew there were so many?), several eggplant varieties, and a bunch of other stuff. We were generally successful with germination (thanks to E), although I think a few things just simply failed. Many of our seedlings have been transplanted, but there are others still growing and waiting for cold-weather crops to come and free up a little room.

The home garden: So far we have mostly summer crops in there -- a couple cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, eggplants, peppers, maybe a few other things. Basil, cilantro, and borage all seem to be doing well on the front porch, and we have so much mint right now that mojitos are definitely going to have to happen soon. (Pics will come eventually)

The Fox Street garden: Peas! Potatoes! Onions! This garden gets the ugly stuff (or at least, the stuff that grows underground or is not colorful enough to be attractive to the neighbors). Last year a lot of people lost their tomatoes and other common vegetables to casual pickers, and the kids pulled up all our carrots, presumably to see if they were done yet. The peas are going strong and I think we'll have a bunch of those within a week. The potatoes have been crazy, but I will leave that until I have a photo of them to share. Fun stuff though.



The Druid Hill garden: As I said above, this is mostly full of cold-weather crops at the moment. Unfortunately something awful ate all of our peas, so they never really made it above three inches. (We ripped those out and did beans instead.) Otherwise we have a couple types of lettuce going, radishes, broccoli and cabbage that will probably do nothing, beets, and chard. Maybe some collards too. We lost our arugula, broccoli rabe, and bok choy after a few warm days when they bolted. Ah well. At least the chickens enjoyed them. We've begun transplanting some summer stuff in the barer spots in this garden too, with more to follow soon.