The one positive thing about a cool spring is that it is great for growing certain vegetables like broccoli and lettuce. Our gardening space is limited but we still found room for over thirty heads of lettuce.
With the recent Romaine lettuce scare, our organic, homegrown Romaine has gotten very popular. I can only eat lettuce two meals a day at best so we have given away a lot of lettuce.
Gardening on the coastal plain of North Carolina is different but can be very rewarding. You have to work with the weather when you can and work around it when you cannot. The lettuce and broccoli pictured to the left were planted on February 10. We started eating lettuce the last week in March. We usually get four good weeks of lettuce. This year it looks like we will have five weeks or more.
Our garden does well and I attribute a lot of our success to the compost that we make each year. If you look at the soil around our plants on February 10 when I planted them, you do not have to be a farmer to guess that it is very rich soil. We have been working on it for years. All vegetable and fruit trimmings, coffee grounds, eggshells, and discarded non-greasy paper products except for newspapers go into our compost bins.
My process is a very manual one of shoveling the compost from the first bin to one of three others. The material as it makes its way through the barrels rots. I emptied my large square compost bin in late January and spread it onto my garden spots. By end of summer, the bin will be ready to empty again as we start cleaning out beds. The twice a year application of compost has made our soil a powerhouse. The only plants that get a boost are my tomato plants which get some liquid fertilizer every couple of weeks during the summer.
Even with rich soil and great weather, our spring garden is winding down. We will still be eating lettuce, spinach, broccoli, and onions for a while longer but if the heat comes quickly, the lettuce will also turn bitter fast. However, we already have tomatoes, peppers, and green beans growing as our summer crops. While our tomatoes are not going to be ripe by that May 30 date like they often do, we should have tomatoes by end of the first week of June. A lot depends on the heat we get. Our green beans will also come in during June. The green bean plants are about two inches high now.
All we have left to do for the summer garden is to stick in a cucumber plant and put in our second crop tomato plants which will provide us with tomatoes in late summer and fall. Sometimes we have enjoyed those tomatoes as late as December. We will pull our green beans out in August and plant another crop of them in mid-September. If all goes well we will harvest them in early November. Once the heat is gone in the fall, usually after the middle of October, we will once again plant lettuce, onions, broccoli, and spinach. Sometimes we plant kale for the winter.
It is not unusual for us to eat some of that fall lettuce in January and even into February. That did not happen this year as the extreme cold temperatures took out all of our fall plantings that had survived through December.
Every gardening year is different and it can be especially exciting in a place where it is sometimes possible to harvest crops twelve months out of the year. There is always a surprise in a garden. The first of ours this year happened to be the strawberries that took over one of our beds. We could have pulled them out but it was fun watching them grow and we have enjoyed having strawberries growing alongside our driveway. My wife even made a strawberry sonker out of the first part of our berry harvest. For those who did not grow up in Surry or Stokes County in North Carolina, this is a good article on sonkers.
