Our embrace of the whole gardening season (such as it is in New England) puts us in the true Yankee gardener camp. We start many crops indoors to get a head start on the season, which opens up some of our garden space mid-summer for late season crops.
We grow early and late season broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower, starting our early crop indoors and our late crop in a nursery bed in early June, following our spring spinach. On our 7-foot high trellis, we grow tall spring peas followed by fall pole beans, the first of which were picked today.
We follow our garlic, onions and shallots with root crops: turnips, daikon, radishes and salad turnips. Our first fall radishes were also harvested today. We slip in two plantings of bok choy, kohlrabi and mustard with almost effortless success. And we plant a crop of late peas after our spring fava beans, though they’re often stymied by trying to germinate in the hot mid-season soil. Sigh.
A few crops are grown successively. Our first two crops of lettuce are started indoors, followed by several direct-seedings through the end of August. (The last went in this morning.) Several plantings of arugula alternate in two small plots. We plant our carrots in three batches, the last going in after our beets, which we start indoors. And we squeeze in a smaller, second crop of zucchini after the first crop of broccoli comes out.
The garden soil is busy supporting crops almost continuously until organized gardening comes to an end in mid-November. Some years we have enough young lettuce plants to keep growing under low row covers through mid-December. And last year, our kales and collards were left in place over winter and survived to give us a spring harvest!
[The photos at right show the fall broccoli, cabbage, pole beans and our first harvest of radishes today.]
