Two Feet in the Dirt

The weather gets warmer, the plants grow bigger, but there’s still some bed space yet to be planted, something I’ve gotten asked about a lot recently. Even though it looks like an oversight, the empty beds are actually completely intentional and provide more than an occasional play space for my son! Coming from larger farms where there are always beds either waiting to be planted or having just been emptied of crops past their prime, this is something that seems natural to me. Still, it is much less common in smaller gardens where it can look like nothing more than a waste of space. In fact, it can be the opposite, providing an opportunity for continual harvests even in tiny areas.

Over the winter, I carefully create a garden plan outlining what will be planted when. Perhaps the most important part of this is planning for succession-planting. While plants like tomatoes and peppers will produce for the entire season, most others, from lettuce, arugula, and carrots to cucumbers, beans, and summer squash, produce for shorter windows. For instance, in my garden I plan to get 3-4 cuttings off of each planting of spring mix, arugula, and baby kale. This means that each of these needs to get reseeded in a new section of the garden every 3-4 weeks so that we can have a continuous supply. And hence the occasional empty beds, all of which will be planted soon with the next round of various crops. And even as the currently empty beds fill up, new empty spots will appear as older, spring-planted crops are ripped out in order to be replaced with others for late summer or fall harvest.

Overall, the garden continues to grow wonderfully, enough so that my son and I were able to take our first donation of the season over to Canaan Baptist Church’s food distribution program. It was my first time donating there and was a great experience. I plan to continue donating at least every other week throughout the season. We took about 4 pounds of greens this past week and I’m looking forward to making even larger contributions as the harvest picks up!