Karen's Garden Delights Journal
3rd week of May 2011

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Still more rainy days are making it challenging to get things in the ground but what is already planted seems to be growing well. Here is a bowl of lush lettuce ready to go into this week's salad bags. I always love lettuce season when we can savor huge salads and put lettuce in everything. For a recent picnic outing, we made jelly, butter and lettuce sandwiches with the last of the strawberry jam from the freezer. Going on top of salads right now are pea shoots and pea blossoms which my younger boys frequently stop by the trellis to snack on. I am snipping young dill for salad as well as salad burnet, bronze fennel and sorrel. The radishes are loving the cool weather and staying sweet longer than usual. I continue to harvest a good portion of garlic scallions to make bunches for Local Roots plus we chop them up in almost everything we cook, they even became a pizza topping recently.

I was able to plant about a third of the tomatoes and peppers this week. With slow planting, my greenhouse feels overloaded and needs frequent watering. I am selling some of the extra tomatoes and peppers plus am finding many opportunities to use the extras for bartering. Several Amish families wanting to start CSAs are thankful for a sampling of unique tomatoes and extra herbs. In exchange I have ended up with sweet potato plants, cinnamon rolls and flower starts. I also was able to share plants for a community garden project a church is planning for a trailer court. Plants are definitely fun to share! I also came home bearing several flats of plants from my friend's greenhouse. She is also a seed connoisseur so I ended up with Chocolate and Red Ruffled Peppers, Red Fig and Mortgage Lifter tomatoes plus various herbs and flowers. This swap included that I will go to their farm sometime this summer to lead a class. And since I still have more plants on my wish-list, when I visited Backyard Herbs in Maysville this week I came home with lavender, Swiss mint, true spearmint and three varieties of scented geranium. Here is one called Lady Plymouth that has a lemon rose smell. I hope to use some of these for pressing leaves for cards and just for pleasurable smelling as I pass by the edible landscape.

Here is our latest equipment purchase, a backpack sprayer. Our hand held sprayer suffered a fatal injury this spring so there were many votes to upgrade to a backpack. Thankfully, spring salad income has been steady to help fund this helpful tool. Here our son is spraying a mixture of fish emulsion, calcium and Bio Seed Boost on the fava beans (an experimental crop that is growing wonderfully.) Last year, we tried to foliar feed every two weeks. This year with the "high-tech" unit, I hope to schedule it every week. The rule is that foliar feeding is most effective when the birds are singing meaning the plant stomata are open in the early morning or at evening. It is one way to give plants a quick nutrient boost.