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.

Sometimes you have to improvise

Our garden is a work in progress.  This year warm spring weather arrived in February.  It has been quite dry, so we took advantage of those conditions to begin planting.  We have planted a variety of seeds to date.  So far only the snow peas, which were planted first during February, have germinated and started to grow.
The first week of March we harvested our winter onions and started planting more seeds as well as cabbage and broccoli transplants. The next week the weather changed, as a winter storm was forecast to hit on the next weekend.
On the following Saturday we went to the garden and found the cabbage and broccoli plants for most part getting established with some signs of scorching from frost.  We were concerned they would not be hardy enough to withstand the winter conditions in the forecast. We had not foreseen this possibility, and so didn't have any covers available to cover the beds.
So, we improvised by using plastic shopping bags to place over the individual plants, with dirt around the edges to prevent them from blowing away.  During the next five days, we were hit with winter cold and strong winds that dropped the temps into the low 20s.
Fortunately our plants survived under the bags. After we took bags off, we experimented with some home made cloches made from plastic bottles and covers.
The next day the plants under them seemed okay, but we took them off as we were concerned they might get too hot under the strong sun as temperatures were climbing into the upper 50s.
Lesson learned: improvisation is okay, but preparation is better.
Cloches need close monitoring and work better for a back yard garden. We will need to get proper covers to have on hand for the beds.

Time for hot weather crops of summer

Summertime is nearly upon us, as our garden crops respond to the changing seasons.  We've been inundated with more lettuce than we can harvest and give away.  Spinach bolted and went out last week. 

Today we harvested the first banana peppers of the season, along with more chard, beets, peas, and of course lettuce.The next week is forecast to be much hotter than it has been with some rain possible.  Still we must water the corn as it has only started coming up and it may not withstand the temperatures near one hundred degrees.