Not always as planned
I feel as if I’m always saying “it has been a weird spring for growing” and this year is no different. We were excited at the prospect of getting greens growing earlier in the greenhouse, but as the photo shows we had terrible luck with a lot of things. Under the insect netting is arugula, beets, and radishes, which had been the only thing that came up in the two rows on the right side. The second row on the right finally has some lettuce, one or two Swiss chard, a few spinach, a misplaced beet, and not much else. We began succession seeding the two right rows in mid-March when the days were unusually warm, but the nights were still getting too cold to hook up the irrigation. We hand watered, we had a protective layer of row cover on everything, we opened the tunnel when temps got too high, and closed it in the evening before it cooled off too much. Weeks passed and nothing was coming up in the second row so we reseeded, and succession seed more beets and arugula which were slowly coming up. It had warmed enough to hook up the sprinkler irrigation so everything was getting consistent watering. Another week or two passed with still pretty much nothing in that one row, so we seeded once again. Maybe some of the seed was older than we thought. While the temps had improved, we had multiple days of cold temps, even froze and broke one of our timers. Frustrating!
Mid-May had warmed up again our seedlings were wanting to go outside. We planted tomatoes, eggplant, basil, tulsi, ashwagandha and other plant in the tunnel, and outside. So far things don’t look overly happy, but are mostly still growing. The ashwagandha has been eaten by something, and I may give up on trying to grow that after this year. I had hoped the greenhouse would help it grow stronger, but no luck so far.
The outdoor garden has also been slow to get going. Some things are doing well, others are not. Our peach has peach curl, and our wild strawberries aren’t quite as happy as they once were. And weeds, well they are doing very well as the cleavers take over our perennial beds. I’ve been kind of frustrated with gardening lately. At times I feel l was able to do better gardening above 9000’ in Eldora, Colorado. At our place it is also a battle to keep the weeds under control and keep things looking presentable since we are in a neighborhood. I could probably spend all of my time with the weeds, and have little time for the food and plant medicine. Perhaps it is best we didn’t start a farm since our couple acres here is a lot to handle!
I’m sure things will pick up and start growing better, it always seems they do.
