Overnight Sunday rain

It was a perfect winter gardening week: a week of sunny days, including a weekend, followed by an overnight rain. My pea, spinach, arugula, and lettuce seeds should have nicely settled in, along with the onion and leek transplants.

A good gardening weekend

A couple of wonderfully sunny warm winter days were perfect for gardening.

I tidied up a forlorn bunch of winter pots and flats (removing frost-nipped plant remnants) and turned over blocks in the main vegetable garden (primarily to help decrease root-knot nematode numbers).

I sowed some arugula (a mustard relative that apparently produces compounds that inhibit nematodes) in one of the blocks. It won't germinate for awhile, since the soil is still very cold (~38°F). My plan is to harvest the arugula as the weather gets warmer (and the arugula spicier!) and replace it with French marigolds, which have a similar depressive effect on root-knot nematode numbers.

So basically the main vegetable garden will be fallow (vegetable-wise) over the summer and can be brought back into production next season. In its place, I'll be growing tomatoes, peppers, beans, and squash in new raised beds (yet to be constructed).

Flats of mesclun, rougette de Montpellier lettuce (a red butterhead variety from Burpee), and spinach were freshly sown, along with another round of seeds for transplants.

In the satellite garden, which is in full sun in winter, the soil is much warmer, approaching 50°F, so it's perfect for putting in a round of sugar snap peas and garden peas.

The beds, which I had covered in compost and turned in the fall, are in good condition, so they were also perfect for planting the onions and leeks that came last week. I dusted the surface of the soil with some corn gluten that I had (after reading a hint about this for onion planting), to depress germination of additional winter annuals, and mulched the beds with old straw. Corn gluten is a mild fertilizer, too.

So, all of the beds in the satellite garden are occupied: five beds of garlic, three beds of onions, 1 bed of leeks, 1/2 bed of scallions, and 4 tomato cage trellises of peas. My beds vary in size, but they're roughly 2 1/2 to 3 ft X 4-6 ft long).

Winter gardens and gardening

More leaves seems to be the theme for preparation for winter in our garden.

My gardening companion collected more leaves this morning from neighbors near our small house in the mountains (to add to our already thick layer in front and back of the house), then we returned home to the Piedmont to a second load of delivered city leaves. He spent more time this afternoon moving some of those.

Leaves are black gold, certainly, and enrich the soil in our woodland garden areas. Leaves transform clay-rich subsoil to something resembling real topsoil quite quickly. A good thing, although our soil in the Piedmont (covered by lawn for many years) isn't as difficult as what faces gardeners in much of our region.

I spent a bit of time harvesting and freezing lemon grass (we're expecting lower temperatures tonight than we've had so far), and then checked everything else. I've got a lovely flat of mache (corn salad) and I'll try to transplant a few plants into soil tomorrow along with some of the collards. I'll probably put the mache in the cold frame with the top propped up, and see what happens. The lettuces still look great, as do the young collards and mustards. None of my fall spinach germinated, probably because of warm soil temperatures and dry soil, so more spinach will need to wait until late winter.

I cooked fresh arugula as a stir-fry green with homegrown garlic for our dinner vegetable, quite delicious, along with the leftover smoked turkey (from 12 Bones in Asheville, yum) from Thanksgiving.

And, I'm planning to harvest more arugula and cilantro tomorrow - both are still looking great.