The season is off to a wonderful start! Our early seedings of peas, beets, lettuce, onions, spinach, chard and carrots are looking great, thanks to well-timed rain in early spring.
It seems you’ve all been enjoying the garlic greens – a rare delicacy which has gotten rave reviews. Snip them up into salads, stir-fry them – be creative! It’s wonderful garlic flavor in green crunchy form. Hmmm...
Our spinach is already winding down, thanks to the few hot days we did get (hard to remember those right now...), but snow peas and sugar snap peas are weighing down the trellis, and lettuce is absolutely beautiful. We’ve been using the tender beet thinnings, roots and all, thoroughly washed and then chopped into a salad – delicious, and ohh so colorful!
We’ve had a fun spring, with Mattie’s playschool friends visiting us one day, and the two kindergarten classes from Centre Hall spent three hours with us the following day. Weather was perfect, and the kids had a good time climbing in with the piglets and even eating spinach fresh out of the garden.
Once again, we’ve taken part of the garden out of production to build the soil with cover crops. On a yearly basis we take part of the garden out of production to raise cover crops, and pasture our pigs in there. It is great for nutrient management and helps break up any disease cycles of the plants. And the pigs love being moved to a new section every other week or so. This yeat the center strip of our garden was seeded in spelt and hairy vetch as cover crops over the winter, and I scattered some assorted outdated seeds in a section closer to the house – which is now a lovely jungle of lettuce, parsley, dandelion, cilantro and hairy vetch. The pigs were moved into a section yesterday with a lot of cilantro that had already gone to seed – those piggies sure smell good! The beneficial insects which we encourage in our garden are also enjoying the habitat which the cilantro provides.
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