The garden is starting to make a little progress. The potatoes have broken ground, and the rhubarb is growning enthusiastically. A lot of weeds are also growing enthusiastically, so hopefully the spring crops (lettuce, chard, bok choi) aren't far behind?
Not much new today, so I had to harvest a little oregano out of the back porch herb garden to try and keep excited about the 2008 growing season. After all, a look around the garden today showed no new greenery, despite recent lettuce sowings a few days ago. This must be a temperature related issue, as the lettuce sown on the back porch sprouted without issue.
Our back porch garden is productive already.... In a pot (from left to right) is thyme, chives, and oregano. Today we harvest a few sprigs of the thyme for our soup, that's 1/4 of an ounce harvested this year already!
Two generations of Honis women were at work on the farm. It was raining off and on, but some weeding was accomplished, and the artichokes went it, as well as a sunroot (jerusalem artichoke).
Farmer Tim decided to clean up his face in time for the summer, after all it must have been getting awful hot under all that wool.
Now he's a respectable member of society again! (at least judging by appearances, although that's no way to judge a guy, especially a guy that helps out by building houses for disaster victims and delivering meals for the needy, regardless of whether he's mistaken as homeless himself, since appearances seem to be how people are judged, but enough about appearances and judging people, since that could be a whole long discussion.)
But back to the farm business, we scrambled on up to the top of a cliff one warm spring day, and check out the cabbage patch we found! Somehow this farmer's crop is well ahead of our own. Don't be sad for the cabbage Tim is holding, it was leftover from last year and we were just helping out the farmer with his spring weeding.
It's been said that Portland has only two seasons: The Cold Rainy Season, and the Warm Rainy Season. I don't know if I agree, after all it doesn't rain for 2 straight months in the summer. But right now, for a few days, its Spring: cool and warm, sunny and rainy, windy and more windy, all in the same day. A picture of Gretel enjoying the season at Rooster Rock:
Ok, there has been some concern about me and the baby chick. For the record, I did NOT eat that little chicken! (Although I did recently enjoy a roaster from Safeway). Nevertheless, those baby chicks are now gone. I would assume that they were sold to good homes, but I couldn't help but notice a fat and content cat in the local feed store's display of "Rhode Island Reds."
March and April are baby chicken months. The local farm stores have them, the nursery has them, even some of the food co-ops have them. This little guy is only 2 days old, but he's super yellow and fluffy already.
You can get one for only $2-3 dollars. Consider that at the grocery store you'll pay $2/lb for chicken and this guy is a lot less than a pound, he doesn't seem like such a good deal. But think again, this is the veal of chicken, no tough dark meat here! Small serving size aside, this little chick was the tastiest 2 bites of chicken I've ever had!!
There's been some confusion, as that last photo really was a potato. (Any similarities to The Sandwich Monster from the AW&BL Trilogy is merely coincidental)
In fact, it was a chitted potato. Our spuds have been chitting for some time, even though I didn't know it. Chitting: the process of pre-sprouting a potato prior to planting in order to maximize vegetative growth once en terre.
Well good to know we did something right! Sure it was an accident (I forgot the potatoes in a paperbag in my trunk for the last 3 weeks), but at least they're off to a strong start!
Planted today in the southern potato field: 'Dark Red Norland' and a few 'Kennebec;' in the northern field we planted 'Purple Majesty' and a few more Kennebec. I also planted a little bit of garlic between the wild garlic and the strawberries, this may have been 'Inchelium Red.' Then some onion 'Yellow Rock' went in to the onion row between Kim Jr and Lil'Kim to replace some that didn't sprout.
Back to the taters: According to the nursery, Kennebecs are intended for "fries and hashbrowns," Purple Majesty is "excellent for baking/frying/chips!," while Norland "has shallow eyes." Hmmm, shallow eyes as a claim to fame? I'll be rooting for this underdog tuber!
We're not sure if today was a good day to plant spuds, but it was sunny so we had to plant something. The good book of western oregon vegetables (referenced in a previous post) is conflicting about its advice about when to plant. One spot says not to even try them before mid-May, another spot says that its an important tradition to plant potatoes on St. Patrick's day. April 4th is a good compromise between those dates, right?
It was (briefly) sunny again today! Since I haven't seen a groundhog this season, I'll rephrase a classic question: If Mr. Potato emerges from his paperbag on April 4th and sees his shadow, does that mean we'll have six more weeks of rain?
Finally a sunny day, and the forecast is for more all week! The overnight temperatures are still a little low and frosty, but are hopefully heading up.
Two mistakes that my Oregon gardening book tells me that we did:
1-pull out all the weeds in February
2-turn the garden over during the rainy season
Result? Our garden is waterlogged and the soil unstructured, resembling silt. Apparently if we had waited until after the rain went away, this wouldn't have happened. Oops, lesson learned for next year...
