The lettuce is up!
Got my first harvest today. It looks like I might be just a few days away from having hit green leaf production critical mass. Last year, I harvested greens from mid June to mid November! This year I could be on a similar track. I’ve got lettuce that came out today and I’ll get spinach tomorrow. The lettuce looks like it will produce for another 30 days, but the spinach is bolting.
Seems that the spinach bolted from seed! I would have loved to get larger mature spinach leaves this year, but it looks like I’ll just get the little baby leaves. Last year I got 6 spinach plants from a nursery and they produced fairly well. I got a number of pickin’s and when they bolted, they got at least 6 feet tall. This year’s seedlings sprouted two adult leaves and then bolted. They are starting to flower at 8 inches. Is it too early to start a fall crop?
The Kale’s looking pretty good. Can’t wait for it to really start to pick up the sun’s energy.
Swiss chard and Collard greens are holding their own. I’m hoping for a few sunny days to really set this crop a-blaze.
The ORMUS experiment hasn’t really taken off like I’d hoped. At the point where I want to harvest lettuce, here are the two beds.
The bed on the right is the one getting the ORMUS compost tea. At this point, I’ve taken a few lettuce leaves, but that’s it. Looking at the two lettuce plantings, I can’t really tell the difference. We’ll see if there are any noticeable differences as the summer progresses (if it does).
Also note that in the ORMUS beds, the slugs found the spinach and beets yet the same damage didn’t happen in the control bed. That kind of skews the experiment, but I figured I’d keep tracking it to see if what survived produces anything of value.
The raspberries are looking great
The new growth that will flower and produce next year is huge! The stocks are at least as thick as my thumb. Last year, they barely grew to the size of a pencil. I hope I get a chance to measure these later in the summer for I’m expecting them to get 8 feet tall! At least, that’s what I’ve read about other ORMUS feed raspberry plants.
Can’t wait to transplant parsley and zucchini this weekend. I’ve got a dozen zucchini to space around the garden and maybe 40 parsley plants. Both produced very well last year so I’m hoping for a repeat (at the least). After I get those in, I’ll probably start some more greens, but, at this point, I’m not sure what to put in. It’s probably time to sift through the seed bag again and see what’s worth risking this late in the season. More spinach? Maybe, for I expect I’ll be cutting everything that I currently have on the garden out in a few days.
Oh well, I have to admit that I’m loving what I’m seeing so far. It’s not a lot, but fortunately, I don’t have to live on it! If I did, the entire yard would be planted and I’d be meticulously tending the plants to make sure no predictors (slugs) beat me to the harvest.
Now, on to something else! Time is meant to be used in productive efforts.
Good day.
