Market Garden

Here is a picture of our market garden taken on Sunday (click on image for an expanded view). My wife and I (read my wife) are doing a CSA this year, and while a lot of the produce is planted up in our kitchen garden this large plot will provide much of the late season goodies. As you can see (or not see as the case may be) not all that I have listed is up yet, however as of Monday night all of it is at least in the ground.

Everything on the right hand side is Danielle's. My only contribution is plowing and tilling of the ground.

I planted four rounds of corn approximately each two weeks apart. The first corn should be ready in early July if the crazy weather hasn't effected it too much. Danielle is enamored with the native American method of co-planting corn, beans and squash the so called three sisters. The traditional way to do this is put all three seeds into a mound. She modified this by intermixing rows of the three crops. The brilliance of this planting system is that the beans fix nitrogen into the soil --which corn needs loads of-- the corn provides a trellis for the beans to climb, and the squash foliage shades the corn roots and crowds out weeds. This is our first year of trying this symbiotic planting so we will have to see how it works.

My other main crop is potatoes. We have three varieties planted in this plot. The Yukon Golds at the top were planted first and are thriving. I have hilled them up repeatedly and they are starting to flower. The Fingerlings were planted somewhat later but are coming up strong and have good looking foliage. The Red Nordlands are actually the result of a failed early crop in an upper field. Both the Yukons and Nordlands were grown from seed potatoes from last years harvest. I planted the Nordlands somewhat early and our cold wet early spring and hot dry late spring was not kind to them. The plants did come up but between the less than stellar weather conditions and the increased potato bug pressure --planted potatoes in the same plot two years in a row-- they were already dieing back. I thus took a gamble, harvested what I could and replanted the potatoes in the market garden. I just got them in the ground this weekend, much later than I would like to plant potatoes but I figured it was worth a shot.

I hope to take this same picture every couple weeks to really appreciate how the garden changes throughout the season.