Harvesting lettuce greens

May 26, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools

After a fun night awake with a baby with stomach flu, I got out as early as I could this morning to harvest the first of the spring mix! It’s important to harvest lettuce as early in the day as possible to keep the bitterness down. Surprisingly, lettuce contains latex, in the form of that milky liquid that leaks out of the stem when cut. At night, lettuce plants pull much of the latex down into their roots. As the sun rises and the heat of the day increases, the bitter latex is gradually sent back up into the leaf, explaining why lettuce harvested earlier in the day tends to be sweeter....

Here comes the sun- kind of…

May 23, 2016 Weekly Updates

I decided I wasn’t going to post this week until the sun came out again! Well, today it has, although in all honesty, it’s actually that weak, cloud-filtered sunlight that wouldn’t really count unless you haven’t seen much else for the rest of the month. Heck- at this point I even get excited about a little bit of blue peeping through the clouds! Last Friday, on a truly gorgeous, sunny day, I was finally able to get all of the summer crops into the ground. Usually, I plant the tomatoes, eggplant, squash, etc. around May 7, close to our average last frost date of the year. Although it hasn’t come close to frosting...

Working together

May 15, 2016 Weekly Updates

Well, the raininess continues, but yesterday we did get a beautiful, sunny morning for the City Harvest plant pick-up. City Harvest is a program within the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Working with a large partnership of urban gardeners and farmers, City Harvest provides seedlings and other supplies to these sites and, in exchange, the farms and gardens donate a share of what they grow to food cupboards and community kitchens throughout Philadelphia. For me, one of the most powerful benefits of growing in an urban setting is the ability to quickly and easily get nutritious food to many people. I had been part of City Harvest with the most recent farm I managed, donating...

May showers

May 8, 2016 Weekly Updates

There hasn’t been much opportunity for gardening this past week. By Mike’s calculation, we hadn’t seen sun from one Saturday to the next. Instead, it’s been a steady succession of rain, clouds, and more rain. After weeks of weather that had been mostly warmer and dryer than average, this real spring weather came as a bit of a shock to the system. But at least it saved me from time spent watering all the seeds planted last week! And, with the rain’s help, we have the first germination in the garden, with both the spring mix and arugula shooting their cotyledons (or first leaves) above the ground. In the midst of...

It’s go time!

May 3, 2016 Weekly Updates

The deer fence is finally up, our biggest project and necessity before the garden can really get going. It turned out to be both easier and more complicated than I expected. Because our garden is built on a moderate incline, we had to bunch the fencing at some of the posts to prevent the change in elevation from causing unwanted slackness. However, the whole process was faster than anticipated, with the entire fence up and ready to go in about two-and-a-half hours. And we were immediately reminded of what all the work was for as several deer watched us finishing up at dusk. Worrying that the deer would run right through the fencing in the dark, we...

Two Feet in the Dirt

Archive for May 26, 2016

Harvesting lettuce greens