A different kind of recovery

Lots of people are thinking about starting vegetable gardens this year, and it seems like a good time to get back to my own garden. This recovery won't be a financial one (despite the economic crash and hardships) but more like a recovery of our footing, after such a massive upheaval in our normal lives from the novel coronavirus.

The last couple of growing seasons weren't great, mostly because ever since contracting Lyme disease from ticks in my own back yard, I hadn't been particularly enthusiastic about spending time out there. I think I'm ready to venture out again.

I was out puttering around in the garden today, the first nice day in what feel likes six months. Two (of three) rhubarb plants are looking better than ever, so I weeded around them and added a bunch of composted manure, and will toss some mulch around them the next time I'm out there. I also transplanted the third plant (which broke into two, so now there are four plants, albeit small ones), which wasn't doing well in another location. It too got a bunch of manure to be followed by mulch.

I expected the asparagus to be up, because I keep hearing of other gardeners in the state starting to harvest the spears in the last two weeks. I must have a different microclimate (maybe they have raised beds, and I don't), because they usually sprout in early May for me. It is early May, but apparently still too early. Or else my neglect has finally killed them, but I tend to think that every year, and it's just me being anxious for fresh asparagus. When eaten directly in the garden, or within a few hours of harvest (as opposed to days) it's excellent uncooked. Sweet and just a little crunchy.

Ironically, last fall was the first time in probably 20 years that I didn't get around to planting the garlic for this year's harvest. We won't be deprived though, because I have millions of volunteer plants. The heads will be small, because they're too crowded to grow to full potential, but perfectly edible. At some point, I'll transplant them somewhere with better spacing, to be next year's main crop.

Belated spring

It's late for the weather to just start to settle, and I've had the onion plants sitting in a box in a sink for the past week, but it's been either too wet or too cold (29 degrees the three nights before last night), which I wasn't sure the onions would survive.

But I planted 150 of them, plus about 25 tiny ones closely spaced for scallions. Much more manageable number than last year's 400+. I think the plants were smaller last year, so we got more to make up for the size.

The garlic is progressing nicely, including a row that's right were last year's crop grew. I must have missed a lot more of them during harvest than I'd realized. Fortunately, they're right on the edge of the bed, so I can plant the tomatoes and peppers around them.

I have shallot seeds, and I should plant them this week, but I've got too much on my agenda. They'll have to wait until Sunday or Monday.

Oh, and a few asparagus spears have popped up.

I'm such a cheapskate

Shortly after I picked a couple pounds of asparagus this morning, I went to the local grocery store, and saw they had a special on asparagus. At TWO BUCKS A POUND.

It's not very nice of me, but I couldn't help gloating a bit. I'd just picked about four bucks' worth of asparagus. For free!

Okay, so it's not really free. We did spend twenty or thirty bucks on new plants to fill in some gaps in the asparagus bed last year, but the quality can't be beat, and we'll be harvesting from them indefinitely. After this year, at least; the new plants are a little scrawny still, so I'm letting them put all their energy back into the roots. We've got enough to pick from the pre-existing plants, which went into the ground something like twenty years ago!

Purple asparagus!

We're trying a new variety of asparagus -- purple passion. The first sprouts are just coming up.

We had a hard freeze two nights ago. I brought in one semi-hardy plant from my deck but forgot I'd put the rosemary out in the garden. Fortunately, it survived. So did the sugar-snap peas (not so surprising) and radishes and dill and onions and garlic. The tatsoi is almost ready for harvest and is absolutely loving the cool, wet weather. (That may be our new shorthand for cool and wet: "Will the tatsoi weather ever improve?")

The new (to us) variety of garlic isn't looking all that great. They're tremendously uneven, with a few really pitiful patches in the row. Normally, I'd attribute it to an area of less fertile soil, but the old (to us) variety is growing more uniformly in a parallel row just a few inches away, which makes me wonder if the patches of anemic plants all grew from the cloves of a single head, and the variety just has more than typically uneven vigor from plant to plant, head to head. If that's true, I wouldn't recommend the variety for the basic crop, but it does offer extra-early harvest, so it may be worth putting up with the uneven growth in a crop that's only intended to provide for a short period when the prior year's harvest is completely gone and it's too early for the current year's main crop.

A spear is to a bushel

The asparagus harvest is over for the season. The plants had been neglected for several years, so they're unevenly productive. What we got was excellent -- sweet and tender enough to eat raw (which is what happened to most of it, although I did steam a few of the tougher stalks over a rice pilaf for dinner one night).

I'm guessing we got about two dozen spears. I have no idea how to attribute that toward our total harvest. Very few made it to the kitchen for cooking, let alone weighing.

If we're ever going to figure out how close we came to our 141 bushels needed for our vegetable self-sufficiency this year, we're going to need more detailed conversion tables. I suspect we're going to have to create our own, though, if it's a matter of converting "X spears of asparagus" to "Y bushels."

Asparagus, at last

It's up.

Well, one tip is up. But it reassures me that I haven't killed them all off, and more should follow in the next few days.

Habits

Every April I become convinced that, surely, this year, my neglect has killed off the asparagus plants.

Fortunately, I have the New Victory Garden book to reassure me that, in this horticultural zone, May is when I should be looking for the spears.