First Failure of the 2010 Gardening Season

Last month, I wrote here about planting spinach in the snow. I have believed unswervingly in this method since I read about it in The Mother Earth News, and have spoken about it with such fervor that I have made several converts.

One such acolyte (you know who you are) informed me matter-of-factly last week that her spinach was an inch high. Now that the temperature is in the 70s, she must be eating baby-spinach salads. Moi, on the other hand, have nothing coming up in my garden. Nothing, that is, except for green grass and emerald weeds.

Being a good (recovering) Catholic, I made an examination of conscience. What had I done wrong, or not done right, to account for this failure? The answer was, I had committed sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. Specifically, I was guilty of autumn sloth.

I confess that by October, when the leaves turn and the birds leave, I get heartily sick of gardening. The intensity of it! The endless planting, weeding, harvesting, washing, blanching, freezing! Lord, I pray, deliver me from all this bounty! Kyrie eleison, hurry up and send that killing frost.

To get the animals ready for winter, I clean out the shed and pile the manure-enriched bedding on the garden. This is hard work, but I do it gladly because it marks the end of the gardening season. When I'm done, I put away the pitchfork and the cart and go inside and light a fire. The last thing I want to do is go back to the dead garden and work the compost into the ground. Instead, I leave it on top of each bed, like a kind of duvet, waiting for the first snow.

When I went out with my seed packets last month, the snow had melted overnight, but the ground was far too hard to work. As long as I was out there, though, I figured I might as well drop the seeds into the compost, and hope for the best.

Well, the best hasn't happened. Those little seeds never did find a molecule of dirt to glom on to, or they would have come up by now. Despite torrential rains, the hay-and-manure duvet was far too thick for them to navigate, and I am sure they are stuck somewhere near the middle of it, not germinating.

As a result of my autumn sloth, I have no spinach, alas, and no arugula. Moreover, last summer having been a bad veggie summer, I now have three packages of frozen veggies in the freezer: one of pureed pumpkin, one of broccoli, one of peas. I cannot believe that I am going to be forced to buy greens at the grocery store.

I know that I should get out there right now and work that fabulous compost into the ground and plant some seeds. And I know that if I do that in the beds where I put in the spinach and arugula I will turn up and kill sad little green embryos. What to do? Just in case, I'll fork over and plant the beds in which I didn't plant the early greens. And in another couple of weeks, I'll replant those early beds again. Mea culpa.

The 2010 Vegetable Garden Is On Its Way!

This being Vermont, any minute now we're sure to have a snow storm. But right now, the sun is out, the wind is calm, and the temperature is a balmy thirty-something. It feels like May outside.

In my vegetable garden, which is close to the house's south-facing wall, it feels like late May and, according to my spinach planting philosophy, I've missed my window of opportunity. My spinach planting philosophy, acquired from an old issue of The Mother Earth News, is to plant spinach while there is still snow on the ground. You put the seeds right on the cold white stuff, and you get a fabulous crop of spinach when your neighbors are still planting theirs.

For two years in a row now, the snow has melted so quickly that I've missed my chance. But planting spinach on frozen dirt is almost as good, and that is what I did today, or tried to. The problem was that my garden is under a foot of compost that hasn't been worked into the ground. I dug my fork into several spaces and managed to come up with bits of dirt that I mixed in with the goat bedding (a souvenir of my girls!) that constitutes my compost. While I was moving the dirt around I came across an earthworm, pink and alive and wiggling.

I am a devotee of square-foot gardening. My vegetable garden consists of a large square, bounded by thick beams, and divided into nine squares, 4'x4' each, with plank-covered walkways in between. If I sound a bit compulsive about this, it's because I am.

Today I decided to plant two squares of spinach and one of arugula, and my mouth literally watered as I was putting in the latter. I love arugula with a passion, and I read on the seed package that you can freeze the stuff, something I've never tried before.

Before planting, I went into the garage and fetched six reeds, about four feet long. These I lay on top of the square, to make sixteen one-foot squares. In this last part, I don't use a ruler, but just try to get the squares roughly even. Then I dropped nine seeds, arranged in rows of three, in each square. I didn't even have to poke holes for the seeds--they just disappeared among the straw and goat poop. I have faith that they will find a molecule of dirt for their little roots to latch onto.

Then I put my tools away and sat on a garden chair and turned my face up to the sun.