You know the gardening season is underway when you get to pick a whole bowl of strawberries for dessert! The garden at 5R Farm is off to a good start this year. The cool season veggies are doing especially well, and it looks like we’ll have plenty of onions, leeks, and kale. The broccoli is looking promising too, so hopefully we’ll get some good sized crowns to harvest this year. Every year I always say that I’m not going to bother with planting broccoli since I never get crowns anywhere near the size of the ones at the grocery store, but then I go ahead and try one more time. The potatoes are looking better this year than last year, and I think it was because I put the straw around them too soon last year, and the slugs thought that looked like a great place to move in to, so I’m holding off on that until the plants get a bit taller and stronger this year, so fingers crossed that solves the problem I had last year.
The warm season veggies, as usual, are a bit slow to get started this year. The evenings were a bit too cool to plant them out until recently, so I just planted the cukes, squash, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, basil, and cilantro a few days ago. They’re at that stage where they don’t do much until they get settled in, and every morning when I go to water the garden they greet me with their rather forlorn little selves. Hopefully the nice sunny weather we are having will get them growing soon. In the meantime, I have ripening strawberries to keep me happy, to be followed soon by the blueberries, and the raspberries. We finally got around to putting up the bird net over the blueberries, so we should get to harvest some this year instead of the letting birds getting them all. The raspberries are in their third year now, and they’ve grown into a 5-foot tall wall of raspberries that the bees are going crazy for, so we should have a bumper crop this year. It looks like this may be the year I’ll have to finally learn how to make homemade jam!
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