Gardening . . . is fun, frustrating, therapeutic and dirty. All things that appeal to my largely Pitta personality. Today has been a good day for tiny green shoots. Not only are the cukes, beefsteak tomatoes and zinnias in our dining room finally showing a little gumption and poking their heads out, but we have teeny tiny beet shoots in the actual garden plot! My previous frustration with the plant’s inability to immediately sprout, mature and produce food has been replaced with parental pride. My rainbow beet babies have entered the world, and I can’t wait to . . . . eat them? Hmmmm not entirely parental.
We are, however, getting ahead of ourselves . . . . sprouts of any kind are exciting enough to make us squeal like a middle school girls, but a lot of work has been done over the past week that should not go undocumented. First and foremost, SOIL PREP. I put this in caps because it falls firmly into the manual labor category, and I mean the large letters as a visual pat on the back to both of us. We aerated, turned, composted and weeded 100 sq. ft. of back-hoe packed earth using nothing but a hoe, shovel and pitchfork. Our plot now looks like a fluffy raised bed of earth with semi-perfect rows of seeds awaiting the right temperature to get growing. Go us!
While we were prepping our soil, we took on the super fun task of deciding what to grow. If you have never looked through an heirloom seed catalog, you must. Barbara Kingsolver was not joking when she described it as one of the most exciting phases of planning a garden. Pages of possibilities sent our minds into daydreams of fat yellow tomatoes and jars of homemade pickles and the riotously colored veggies begged us to plant them. If we had not been careful we would have had more species than our plot can handle . . . honestly there was still some overflow. Leah armed with her intense new garden book, and a far more detail oriented eye than myself, drew a garden chart before we ordered anything and saved us from committing to tons of seeds that we simply did not have room for. I have found, that the excitement of having this plot is driving us to want everything immediately . . . forgetting that there are more seasons in our future, with plenty of time for all the varietals we MUST try.
As it stands, we have seeds in the ground (Beets, Carrots, Salad Greens, Cabbage, Squash, Cukes and Beans) and seedlings in the dining room (Tomatoes, Cukes, Eggplant, Flowers, and Tomatillos). My impatience, which I am sure was beginning to drive Leah slightly insane, has been replaced with happiness for now. Short of actually sitting there and watching the spouts grow, I could not be more of an overprotective parent. We check these seed(ling)s every day and exclaim happily when a new one breaks the surface.
We at Currant Table have now joined the ranks of urban farmers, and can say without fail, that if you have the opportunity to do so as well, you should most certainly take it.
Parting Thoughts and Links:
Favorite seedlings of the week :
Leah: “Zinnias, because a garden is simply not complete without zinnias!”
Caitlin: “Beets … first seeds to sprout in the actual garden plot and provide hope that we did this right”
High Mowing Heirloom Seeds: http://www.highmowingseeds.com
Annie’s Heirloom Seeds: http://www.anniesheirloomseeds.com