March 2021 and I am days away from starting the vegetable garden, looking at the garden and dreaming about peas.
In early March of 2020, I traveled to NYC, convinced that Covid was just a Trump thing. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, March 10-13: the Richter opening at Met Breuer, the Mexican Muralist exhibit at the Whitney, the Met for the Met. We ate out day and night. My friend Keris concocted hand sanitizer while I naively braved the subways. We had a “last supper” at Sunday in Brooklyn, a wonderful restaurant where I told my son and our friend Josh to order whatever they wanted on the menu. When the city shut down on Friday the 13th, I began to convince my son to accompany me back to Colorado. He wanted to stay, hesitant to flee the city, to leave his work and life. He acquiesced; and we flew out on the 15th of March. I promised that we would start the vegetable garden together. Before the pandemic struck I was going to let the garden go fallow for a season because 2020 travel loomed on my horizon.
Early March in my garden
Late March in my garden
To say 2020 was the year for vegetable gardens is an understatement, a silver lining of the pandemic among many dark, stormy clouds. I had been growing food since the 80s, in janky pots on a fire escape off my apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. Many years and many gardens later, designed for myself and my clients, I have landed with an edible landscape, surrounded by fruit trees and perennial crops, dominated by raised beds with fancy soil. Like me, my son had experimented with growing basil on his deck in Gowanus to impress his friends with home-made pesto al gnocchi at harvest time. But he had never tackled a large, vegetable garden. I soon realized that growing food was not an intuitive process and there was a lot for my son to learn.
Seed packets from local nurseries
As the world struggled to cope and businesses shuttered, I drove to my favorite, family-owned nurseries and bought all the seed I could, too late in the game to order organic seeds on-line, as I did in years past. I was desperate to get what little seed stock available out there. As guilty as I felt for not being able to order organic seeds, I did discover seed tape, teeny tiny seeds spaced correctly for planting sandwiched between biodegradeable paper. You just lay the tape down and cover it with a little dirt. Ingenious.
First thing we did was to prepare the garden beds. Don’t till the soil, I told him. No double digging. Let the dirt, microbes and mycorrhiza all be. Soil is alive and we don’t need to muck it up. Tilling is passe. Just remove the sleeping weeds from last season and scrap a little hole to put a couple of seeds in every foot or so.
This year we skipped amending the soil as I did the previous year by adding an inch or two of mushroom compost on top. The spring rains wash the compost into the soil. To be clear, I explained to my son that I no longer allow, and I advise my clients against, animal byproducts in vegetable gardens. Only organic, vegetarian compost is allowed. Compost, with animal byproducts like manure, contains salts and traces of antibiotics, leaching from the soil into the storm water runoff as non-point source pollution. VERY, VERY BAD.
My drawing
In cold climates like Colorado, March is the time to plant vegetable seeds that stand up to spring snows and frost, thriving with the subsequent moisture: peas, radishes, kale, broccoli, and arugula. Most people think these tender seedlings can’t withstand the cold. What they don’t understand is that these cool season vegetables can’t stand the heat. They love the cold.
Snap peas, sugar peas, snow peas, all the green varieties that you can eat raw off the vine. Peas grow on vines; and vines like to climb. Plant them against the fence, I told my son. Peas come from the legume family. As such, they naturally fix nitrogen in the soil, helping with fertility. No need to add chemical fertilizers, which in turn adds salt and pollutes our streams and rivers (see above under animal manure compost). When the weather warms and danger of frost passes, we will plant young tomatoes between the peas so they can grow up in the heat while the peas die back.
Staggering when you plant with what you plant is important knowledge to get the most out of your space and harvest. For example, I always plant garlic in the fall for harvesting garlic ramps in the spring and garlic cloves in late summer. That garlic holds it’s own against spring storms.
Garlic ramps
Garlic in the snow
I instructed my son to plant radish seeds every other week or so, not all at once, to get a continuous crop throughout the spring, until you are sick of radishes. That’s the thing about vegetable gardening, growing your own food means eating your own food, WHEN it is in season. But that also means, at least for me, that I get sick of eating radishes and peas, week after week. When they are done for the season, so am I. No more radishes until next spring! But to pick these vegetables fresh from your own garden and explore ways to cook them is magic, like none other.
Garlic ramps & peas
Radishes
Beyond peas, I can’t wait to put in all those other sexy vegetables seeds I ordered. This year, on advice from my totally, excellent, gardening friend Rhonda, I ordered from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, https://www.rareseeds.com/ These 2021 seeds are in addition to the left-over seeds from last year (they do last a year or so). I augment the seeds with starts of tomatoes and peppers (traded for mara des bois strawberry plants in my garden), and onion, leeks, eggplant, basil and other tender herbs from local nurseries. It’s just March. We haven’t gotten to the carrot love part of the story.
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
Mara des bois strawberries & rhubarb
Carrot love!
