Spring Thoughts

 At this time our spring planting is well under way, and some of our crops are making progress.  With some good rains recently the garden is beginning to recover from the devastating effects of prolonged drought from last fall an into the winter. It goes without saying that much depends upon weather. Many of our fall plants were severely damaged by long lasting aphid attacks due to the prolonged warm season and no frost to kill them. 

So far this spring our snow peas, spinach, and potatoes are doing well. Our fall planted onions are showing stress from drought over the winter. Two plantings of carrots failed, due to a hard frost, and the replanted seed didn't come up. While the rain barrels help, rain is still the best. We are grateful for the recent rains, which have helped considerably.

Spring garden progress is happening

Snow peas!

The spring has brought its share of challenges, beginning  with earlier than normal warm weather in February, drought, and killing frost in March.
 
 Lately we've been so busy in the garden we haven't had time to post.

 


Overall the weather enabled us to clean
up the garden and prepare the beds. We harvested  most of the winter onions as green, leaving some to mature along with garlic which we had also planted last fall.

The first spring crop to be planted was snow peas, and we built an improved pea support using bamboo. Working with bamboo was another challenge, but it did go up and is serving its purpose.

Snow peas support

Red and Green Kale

The drought slowed germination and growth of crops. Timely rains have finally arrived, and now that frost danger is past we'll have our irrigation on again. We have an abundance of greens and have begun harvesting lettuce, spinach, kale and snow peas. We are grateful for the abundance of early produce.

Our current challenge is cabbage loopers which are raising havoc with some cabbage, but we are working to limit the damage using BT a biological control.

                                                                   There is never a dull moment at Koinonia Community Garden.