Spring Garden
As my cool season Brassicas begin to show signs of bolting, I wanted to share some of the things in the garden I've been enjoying before the transition to a distinctly Summer phase is complete.
1-3. Springs greens, peas, and herbs. Purple bok choy, orach, various lettuces, tatsoi, chijimisai, mizuna, mispoona (!!), kale, radicchio, peas, chard, and some volunteer claytonia, cornflower, and borage. These are the beds where the few pests seem to appear. Some leaf miners in the Chard I tend to ignore. They mature and move on once the summer heat comes, leaving the leaves clean to eat right as most of the other greens begin to bolt and diminish. The aphids inexplicably chose one single Tatsoi that was bolting to accumulate on. They all ascended its towering flower stem together like some great ziggurat and oriented themselves to the sun, praying to an unknowable deity as they lived their unknowable lives. I felt bad when I cut it down and destroyed them all together.
4+5. Vibrantly purple stemmed mustard and spinach giving way to paste tomatoes. Shell peas giving way to peppers. 6 Tomatillos in pots, which is perhaps 5 too many.
6+7. Berries and Carrots. Boysenberries, blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries. All of these receive shade until late morning but are still maturing well. The squirrels destroyed only some of the carrot seedlings out of everything in the garden, maybe because the soil was not covered. I will take it as an opportunity to begin succession planting.
Beans. Yellow wax, dragons tongue, and chinese long red. This bed receives partial shade until later in the season when the sun is higher in the sky. I will plant cucumbers in here next week along the back row.
Little orchard of 9 dwarf fruit trees. The smaller 4 towards the front are new this year, but the rest are several years old and have a lot of fruit hanging right now. Apples, European plums and pears, sweet cherries, and a nectarine. I've taken them inside twice this spring to protect them.
10-12. Spring flowers. Yarrow, snap dragons, hollyhock, honeysuckle, cornflower, creeping phlox, and a walmart dianthus i've been overwintering for a few years now.
- The Guardian. It's hard work but she relishes it and she's paid a handsome salary of peas and berries each year, to which she helps herself. I think it's interesting the words for Garden and Guardian are so similar, and indeed share a similar Proto-Indo-European root sound, which makes you wonder if somewhere in our distant past they represented the same concept. To enclose, to watch over, to grasp. Aren't these the foundational concepts of our civilization and the biophilia that resides at the core of our being, which binds all living creatures together?
I'm struck by the impact of biodiversity and equilibrium that drives everything, and the healthy food webs that prevent an explosion of issues that I probably should have from over planting this much. I have few pest or weed issues and I have never sprayed anything at any point. I attribute this largely to the beneficial predator insects and applications of compost teas. I occasionally pull a few small bindweed.
Hope you enjoyed seeing some of the garden. I'd love any advice for improvement. I have no idea what i'm doing, but I really like mizuna.