Filling the spring garden gaps
There are a lot more gaps than usual to fill in the garden this spring. The cold, wet winter killed two-thirds of our potato onions
and softneck garlic (although our hardneck garlic, Music, is plugging
right along unhindered). A dry spell when I didn't think to water
made for holey germination in the carrot and Swiss chard beds, and Huckleberry's hard work scratched up some peas and poppies. Time to fill in the gaps!
For some crops, it's not
too late to just replant. I scattered another round of carrot
seeds on the appropriate bed and popped Swiss chard seeds into hoed rows
(after teasing apart the one seed cluster that had fully germinated,
leading to three seedlings in one spot). There were enough poppy
seedlings clustered too close together that I could just transplant them
to fill in the gaps, and then I slipped broccoli starts into the holes
between garlic plants.
After
that, I started getting whimsical. How about a few carrots in the
gaps in the pea beds? Maybe some Red Russian kale in the spaces
between potato onions?
The trick with filling in
gaps is to add crops that will mature at about the same time as the
vegetables that originally owned the bed. You also don't want to
plant something that's going to get too big, shading out the vegetables
you really care about, and you definitely don't want to add anything
that will need trellising. So no cabbages, even though I have
plenty more starts on hand, and nothing that will need more than two
months to mature. (The carrots are small hybrids, listed at 54
days to harvest.)
I seeded and transplanted
Monday and Tuesday, knowing a rainy spell was due to blow in Tuesday
afternoon. Hopefully water from the sky will sprout my seeds and
settle my transplants, filling the garden with life.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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