It is an interesting time for the garden. As I've mentioned earlier, we made a plan and a schedule for every square inch of our 96 square feet at the Downtown Community Garden. So far it has all been going well, as our little piece of earth has transitioned from bare soil, to sporadic sprouts and seedlings, all the way to where we are today, with plants up in every single box. And as exciting as it is to watch each plant emerge from beneath the cover of the ground, exclaiming with delight at each new discovery, right now is so much better. Better, because it means we finally have something to eat!
Yes, these are the salad days of the garden. And I mean that in the most literal sense possible: we've been eating salad on a nearly-daily basis for about a week now with no signs of slowing! The master plan, drawn up in the dead of winter, called for planting a full bed each with spinach and lettuce, intending all along to replace them with peppers and zucchini once it's warmed beyond the leafy greens' happy temperature. We haven't reached that part of the growing season yet, though, so it means that every trip down to the garden results in a bag full of lettuce and spinach that seems to grow back almost as soon as it's picked. It's glorious! Last night we had lettuce-spinach salads with homegrown radishes, homemade croutons, and a hard-boiled egg. It was a delicious meal, and practically the only thing on it we didn't raise ourselves was the egg. We're planning to work on that part in the future, but we'll need a bit more land than we have in our little condo.
So things are going almost perfectly according to plan. The biggest concern I can dream up right now is if our heirloom "Slobolt" lettuce decides to keep producing into the summer and I have to choose between pulling our lettuce and planting our peppers or running the risk that the peppers don't have time to mature. Not exactly the worst problem to have, right? But we'll cross that bridge if and when we come to it. For right now, nothing can throw the garden off track.
Unless...
Someone decides they no longer want to garden downtown, putting their plot up as available, while simultaneously we discover that there is a two (2!) plot per household limit. Saying yes to this was a no-brainer, but it really does put a kink in our plans. All the scheduling we've done, all the allocation of how many seedlings to start, was all done based on a 96 sq ft farm. How would we have planned differently if we'd known we had 192??? Things might have been laid out totally differently, but no sense in worrying about that now. Today's reality is we have the wonderful gift of an untouched 8x12 ft rectangle of garden.
And when I say untouched, I really mean untouched. There are literally trees growing in this plot. And weeds. Lots and lots of weeds. And something that looks like leeks, but honestly, I'm not really sure. So regardless of what we might or might not have planned to plant in this space, the plan from this point forward is pretty clear. Weeding. Pitchforking. Weeding. Adding compost. And more weeding. Then we can start thinking about what to plant here. Wednesday we headed down to at least get some of the big monstrosities out of the bed. It's still not perfect, but I think it's an improvement.
At present, and once we get the remaining weeds out, it's looking like this will be the Zink Square Footage vine patch. Zucchini will be relocated to this space, and we grabbed some Seed Savers Butternut Squash seeds. Despite never eating it as a kid, I've grown to really love Butternut Squash, so I'll be very excited to have some of our very own. Maybe throw in a couple of cucumbers or something, possibly some root veggies to help bust up the soil, and we're looking pretty good. Ideally, this will also, in part, become a garlic plot this fall. I can hardly think of a recipe that I cook that doesn't use garlic, so it would be a lot of fun to grow some of the more unique varieties in our plot.
Zink Square Footage is still pretty small, but we're expanding. We don't yet have 40 acres and a mule, but we do have 200 square feet, and a few thousand worms. If that's not a respectable urban farm, I don't know what is!
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