Larrapin Potager Snapshot: April 1, 2012
In Northwest Arkansas, like many areas of the South, their are really two distinct garden seasons: Spring/Early Summer & Fall. In between there’s a stretch of heat in late July to late August that not a lot is going on except hunkering down and hanging on till cooler weather comes back. This year we’ve had the earliest Spring many folks have ever seen, which can make a farmgirl feel way behind, even though it’s still, technically, a couple weeks before the last frost date. Luckily, the stuff I planted last fall makes the garden feel full and well underway, despite the nagging question of unpredictable Spring weather and how behind schedule I may/may not be.
Spring weather always creates a challenge for me and the super early spring of 2012 adds another layer of guessing. Is it going to stay so warm that it’s way past the best planting times for cool spring crops? Hard to tell. Some springtimes will turn cool and rainy, so things like spinach, kale, beets, and other cool-season crops will go and go. Meanwhile, if you have jumped the gun and put out the heat lovers like tomatoes, beans and squash, they sit there and look cold, miserable and begin to molder, etc. On the other hand, if it stays mostly warm and sunny, then you have the *chance* for amazing early crops. It’s all a kind of gamble. In fact, I think gardening is an excellent cure for those tempted to gamble because every planting you are rolling the dice on about ten different variables. It drives me crazy, but I love it!
One garden gambling technique we call “the landing party.” If you ever watched the old original Star Trek like I did as a kid, you couldn’t help but notice when the crew was going to ‘beam down’ to a new planet there were always a couple anonymous cast members that accompanied the higher ranking crew. Usually fresh faced and blonde guys. They also usually didn’t come back. Landing party. So around here, I’ll sometimes put out a too-early test run of a crop to see what happens, while holding back transplants on the light table to replace them if they turn out to be…yikes, landing party! Buy hey, Captain Kirk always won out one way or another! 🙂
Flowers on the Larrapin Kale
I’ve found Fall planting is often more reliable than Spring. Fall planted spinach, kale, multiplier onions, garlic have amazed me with their steady-on growth. Especially when we didn’t have much of a winter at all..check out the fall-planted kale—which we ate all winter— flowering like mad! In this case it’s great because that’s a special seed-saving patch and lucky for me the bees are giving it tons of attention. With fall planting you have that wonderful green, full-looking garden…even if you are way behind on getting much early-spring stuff in the ground! I love all that color. And in the event you need more color, you can always use a cute saki bottle on top of bamboo as a little marker for a new grape…a marker that also keeps you from poking your eye out on the bamboo!
Saki bottle as plant marker
How is your garden going?
