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Let's face it, many of us living in the urban jungle can't break away from the modern city centers and its conveniences to move out to the rural, green acres, buy land, and begin a commercial-scale farming production.
What we can do, however, is pull community resources together to utilize small-scale gardening practices that help us become more resilient and reliant on a household/community level. Whether it's in your backyard, your neighbor's (with permission, of course), or down the lane at the community gardens, families can have fun growing fresh food for their family right in the city or suburb. Patio gardens are excellent for apartment-dwellers, and they are extremely low maintenance! All you need to do is Water It With Love!!
Don't have a greenthumb? That's okay! Maybe you'd like to start but don't know where or how...
It's okay! As they say, baby steps are still movement! We love sharing our knowledge on how-to's, so stay tuned to our blog posts. With over 40 years of experience in food and herb production between Gayle and Eric, we'll provide great tips on when to plant, how to plant, what tools work best for diy projects, how to preserve the harvest, garden-to-table recipes, and more! Find us on Instagram @WateritWithLove for more frequent shares and videos from the garden!
Spring Planning: Seeds and What to Plant When
After a deep winter, nothing feels better than to be in the garden. It's all about seeds, getting the hands dirty in the soil, adding compost to annual vegetable gardens, early spring harvests, and bouquets of flowers for sweet celebrations! In this blog, I'll share the step-by-step phases that I tend to go through to plan my spring garden:
a few seed companies and ways to find a local seed company in your area
when to plant cover crops and other early spring crops
how to transplant from greenhouses when you can’t start from seed
suggest what types of plants to put in the garden so that you can harvest food early in the spring
suggest one simple way to preserve the early spring herb harvests
Over the course of March, April, and May, over 75 types of vegetables, fruit, herbs, and flowers have been planted in our 15x30 ft. garden. Over 50 varieties had been planted by seed, many perennials are coming back, and the latest plantings were eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, parsley, and a few other transplants that we received from a local greenhouse. Check out the five phases to setting up a nice, spring garden.
Phase One: Pick your seeds
Don't know where to find good seeds? Check out your local natural grocer. If they don't have a local seed company in stock, check out your local farmer's market. Often times, local farms will have their own seeds for sale. In the Rocky Mountain region, Masa Seed Foundation, Lake Valley Seeds, and Annie’s Heirloom Seeds (WI) have wonderful varieties of organic and heirloom plants. Another favorite of mine is High Mowing Seeds from Vermont, U.S.A. They focus on organic farming practices, offer over 600 varieties, and the customer service experience was great.
No matter where you live, try to support a local seed producer, as there are many benefits to using regionally-adapted seeds. The ultimate option is to save your own seeds, but more on that in a future blog.
Planning Phase 2: Slow and steady planting
The weather, moon cycles, cover crops, and length of growing season all impact when we plant certain varieties of crops. For example, snap peas, beets, spinach, and broccoli love cool weather, so they prefer to be sown in March and early April, depending on your USDA Zone of Hardiness. However, tomatoes, peppers, and melons prefer warm soil, so in Colorado, this means after Mother's Day and maybe even waiting until June due to sporadic hail and frost. Ideally, night temps must consistently stay above 55 degrees Fahrenheit for warm weather crops to thrive.
Have you ever heard of planting and harvesting with the moon cycles? We plant seeds near the new moon, because when they sprout nearly two weeks later, they will be under the light of the full moon. The sprouts love the extra light that seem to help the plants grow even more during the early stages of the life cycle. Often, ripe fruit are ready to pick under the light of the full moon. Watch the cycles in your garden and see what works best for you.
Succession planting is when you begin a series on plantings of the same crop, so that the harvests follow one after another - prolonging the harvest season and the bounty. Not only does it offer more food in the end, but we have found great benefits to planting more than one time in the season. Bugs have life cycles and beetle larva, for example, feed at certain times in the season. So, if one crop gets decimated because its leaves were ripe and juicy for the taking, we may have a chance of a harvest if the second crop isn’t ready yet and the bugs aren’t attracted to it. Another reason to consider succession planting is for a better success rate if seeds do not germinate. Succession planting is excellent for lettuce, spinach, peas, squash, corn, and herbs.
We planted cover crops, both crimson clover and a legume/oat mix, in early March. There are a few ways to work with cover crop. You can mow it down when it goes to flower, so that you use the leaf litter as chop-and-drop mulch. The legume mix can be turned into the soil as a "green manure" rich in nitrogen by mid-May for the crops we want to grow all summer. Also, the crimson clover can still grow in areas we do not want the soil exposed. Things like zucchini, sunflowers, herbs, and flowers can grow around the clover without fighting for space. Bees and other pollinators LOVE the crimson clover!!
Corn is one crop with a limited growing season. There is a saying from the Midwest that says you'll have a good crop if your "corn is knee high by the Fourth of July!" If corn isn't knee high by the fourth of July, it's an indicator that the stalks and ears won't be nearly as fruitful as they could be. One never can say when it's the perfect time to plant, but it seems early May did the trick this year. Our Enchanted Milling Corn took and looked to be on track for the 4th!
Planning Phase 3: Can’t plant from seed? Buy from a nursery!
I get it. Not everyone has a green thumb or even then, face challenges when planting by seed. Sometimes, it's worth going to someone else who specializes in growing certain varieties! There's a trick, though. Transplants from a garden center or greenhouse need to be "hardened off" before going into the soil. Many sources recommend one full week, but if you are itching to get them in the ground, here's what I suggest:
Expose the watered plants in full sun for half a day, then bring them in from the elements. Next day, leave out all day, then bring them in. Keep soil moist. The third day, keep out all day and night. On the fourth day, plant, fertilize, and water.
Extending the garden bed was a spring garden project that was inspired by the overwhelming number of seeds and transplants we have! "Where to put those ground cherries, lemon balm, double-click cosmos, big max pumpkins, jack-be-little pumpkins, and more? In the newly extended garden bed that we will make, of course!" - Gayle, late-May musings.
Planning Phase 4: What to plant in order to eat an early spring harvest?
Early spring harvests have been small, but gratifying, to say the least. Perennials such as sage, oregano, rhubarb, yarrow, chives, and violets have been blessing us with their early shoots. However, we are only working with 15x30ft. of space. Imagine if you had a big garden to work with! Are you curious about what you can grow to get an early harvest?
Try these perennials that will come up every year:
Asparagus
Rhubarb
Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes)
Strawberry
Herbs like sage, oregano, chive, garlic chive, and mint
Try these annuals in early March, April, and May:
Herbs like parsley, cilantro, and dill
Spinach, swiss chard, and kale
Legumes such as snap or snow peas
Celery
Root crops like carrots, beets, and radish
Phase 5: Preserve the harvest
People may think that harvests only happen in the fall, but no! We're flush in oregano and rhubarb, so we've had to work on preserving the harvest, already! This year, I'm gifting organic olive oil with sage flowers and oregano to friends and family. I thought this was the perfect way to preserve the deliciously, fragrant oregano!
How to make herb-infused oil:
Simply harvest herbs, like oregano and sage flowers, allow them to dry out for a day or two to release any moisture. Next, stick them in a clean jar, and drizzled organic extra-virgin olive oil over the herbs until the oil covered the top of the herbs. Allow to infuse a few days before use.
Easy peasy, and what a lovely gift to give and to receive!
How to bring a little cheer into your home:
The kids love harvesting, so meager harvests have been "lame," and the big DIY projects have been mundane and dreadful to them. It's hard to get the kids excited to be in the garden at this time of year, but I found that giving my youngest daughter a freshly-picked bouquet of flowers for her very special day was just the thing to put a smile on her face and brighten her day! She even wanted to wear one of them in her hair!!
Summer Solstice is just around the corner, and that means garlic will almost be ready to harvest, sunflowers are taller than my children, and almost all of our plants will be in the ground and thriving. All those little seeds of intention that we sowed this early spring will be coming to fruition. New projects will always be in the works, the kids will be forever busy, and my head may spin with the whirlwind from the wildness of life, but I know that giving thanks for the little things make the big picture that much better!
We hope you, too, find joy in the small things that make life so grand.
In love and light,
Gayle
Get Started Early (NOW!): Spring Garden Projects and More
My first ever blog post... Who knew I'd find the time to put down thoughts into word form outside of a journal, business plan, or the always evolving to-do list?! I'm excited to share the knowledge, family fun, and the love of gardening with the world. As they say, there's no time like the present, and right now, it's an exciting time of year in the Northern Hemisphere! If you’re visiting from the southern hemisphere, welcome and may this inspire for next growing season!!
It's March, and in Colorado, the temps are quickly rising. Just enough for us to work the soil, plant a few early spring crops, and give thanks for getting back in the garden. Over the past couple weeks as night temps begin to rise above freezing, we have been slowly amending with worm castings, fresh top soil, turning compost, adding manure, and taking off the layer of straw that protected small garden beds from the harsh winter winds. The soil is looking so fertile, and there are TONS of worms when I turn a small area of the garden beds! Garlic that was planted in October is coming up, slow to rise from being under a couple inches of straw mulch. Now that they are in the sun, I have no doubt they'll be quick to rise!!
Spring Projects and Tools
Now that it's time to get back into the garden, here are 5 ideas on projects and tools needed for this early spring: 1) A broadfork works great to loosen the grass roots around the garden plot fence line. Meadow Creature broadforks are fantastic quality and are easy enough to handle for small-scale garden projects. It may be needless to say, but in the community garden, we are often battling grass roots from the walkways that tend to creep into the beds... How to conquer it for more than one season, well, that's a whole other blog post! *Hint- we rely heavily on cardboard and wood mulch as shown in picture below! Grace enjoys using her 2) Hori Hori garden knife that's a fairly small size, and it works well for pulling the few "weeds" that found their way through the straw mulch. I say "weeds," in quotation, because we know that most opportunistic plants have medicinal properties and can be used for a variety of remedies, however, while we may enjoy Dandelion, our 200 neighbors may not. It's good to control the pollen and seeds from these "weeds" for now! Also, did you know that the term ‘weed’ is defined as an unwanted plant in the yard, and they sure have gotten a bad wrap in the past 100 years.
To plant in the spring, we do not mechanically till, but we do turn 3) fresh compost, top soil, and worm castings into the soil with the broadfork where we are about to plant annual vegetables. We love perennial plants, including vegetables, fruit, herbs, and flowers, but there are just some crops that we LOVE that have to be planted every year. According to multiple sources, such as Bill Mollison's Introduction to Permaculture, tilling over the long-term degrades the soil and makes the gardener work harder over time to replenish key nutrients required for successful harvests. Plus, we all prefer less pests, more beneficial bugs, and overall better soil health. Every fall, we layer about 3 inches of leaves in the soil, as well as, compost from the family food waste, garden materials, newspaper, and cardboard (no ink, staples, or tape!). Come spring, these have all broken down in the soil, making it gardener's gold! This gardener's gold is also known as sheet mulching. More on that later. To serve multi-purposes, we created 4) swale-like pathways, where rain runoff can seep into the straw mulch. This reduces weeds in the pathways, and when the garden beds are full of lush vegetation in July-August, the pathways have been some of the only places where weeds find opportunity to take root.
I thoroughly enjoy the small-scale garden, because it allows me to work more with my bare hands. For example, I LOVE to 5) sew seeds by hand, and I will carve their paths with the side of my hand. Acting like a hoe or trowel, my hand cuts into the plush soil to the depth needed, depending on the seed variety. This also requires the Forgotten Art of Squatting! True thing!! And it's an incredible practice for women, and men, to practice while gardening. It's a sacred connection to the earth, and it is an honor to garden. Our body movement matters, so I (we) like to stay conscious of this while gardening.
Spring Plantings and Tips on How to Plant Them
If I didn't just lose you on the Forgotten Art of Squatting, next I'll fill you in on a few types of cool-weather crops that can be planted in March. Depending on your zone, the following can be planted from seed directly into the soil as soon as it can be worked:
dark-leafy greens like kale, chard, spinach, mustard greens
peas
carrots
beets
radish
chervil
broccoli, kohlrabi, cauliflower, brussel sprouts
cover crops (we use a red crimson clover and a legume/oat mix).
We have tried two methods to growing snap peas, one just direct seed and another method where I was taught to soak the beans overnight in an unbleached paper towel that has been lightly soaked in filtered water. It speeds the germination rate, according to my mom. After testing both methods, I would have to admit that the soaked peas (and pole beans) sprouted sooner. However, the directly-seeded plants still sprouted and produced wonderfully! In this case, do what makes the most sense to you and if you’ve got the time and memory to soak prior to planting!
On March 8th, we planted the soaked Sugar Daddy Snap Peas, along with establishing a brand new patch of raspberries. Our community-garden plot neighbors gave us two varieties of raspberries, and now I'm attempting to have our very own!!! We simply cannot wait for fresh berries, berries in cream, raspberry syrup, raspberry crumble, and homemade jam! I feel a bit like Forest Gump and Bubba-Gump Shrimp with all the options!! :)
On March 12th, we planted celery, carrots, and beets. Carrots love consistent moisture, so we cover these with one of our row covers and check the moisture frequently to make sure they don't dry out! The late winter/early spring rains are scattered and can never be counted on to actually produce enough to cover the ground.
I'm beyond thrilled for all the new things happening this year. New ventures, new opportunities to learn, new plant varieties in the garden! I hope this is the first of many great posts about our garden experiences.
Happy gardening, friends!
G
