Getting Crops In The Dirt : Corn, Bush Beans and Celery

One by one the garden beds are filling with my future harvests.  As the weather has warmed up over the past few weeks I have been starting various crops depending on how hardy they are.  Onions, spinach, potatoes, lettuce, peas, carrots and turnips have all been planted and I finally got the broccoli transplanted a couple of weeks ago.  The last frost date is fast approaching, so now is the time to get the warm weather crops going in the garden.  I tend to plant things that come up slowly a few days before the last frost date.  I try to give things as much of a head start on the season as I can, though sometimes I end up replanting them if a late frost comes and kills the sprouts.

I planted my corn first since I know from experience that corn can still tolerate a light frost if given a little protection.  I want to do a companion planting of squash with the corn, so I want the corn to get a head start before I even plant the squash seeds.  If the corn can get tall before the squash spread out and shade everything then both crops should do well.  This year I am trying to grow Glass Gem corn.  I didn't have much luck with it last year, but there was an irrigation glitch in that bed, so hopefully they will have better success this year.  The squash I intend to plant with the corn is a winter squash named Ute Indian Squash.  The Ute tribe lived in this area in the not too distant past so I think that this variety of squash should do well here.

Planting the beans was the next project.  That was a simple operation of leveling the chosen bed and setting up the irrigation for it before making shallow trenches with a hoe and planting the bean seeds.  I used three varieties in this bed this year.  One was the Calima Bush Bean which is what I planted and replanted several times last year.  One was a purple podded variety that I saved from seed in the past couple years, but I lost the variety name. The third was a white seeded variety called Tenderette that was also seed saved from previous years.  I am interested to see how each variety does this year and based on how things grow this summer I will save seeds for my future plantings from the best plants.

The bed that I transplanted my celery into was the very last of the short beds in my garden.  The celery starts have done quite well since they were planted all those weeks ago back in January.  They were finally big enough to be transplanted to their permanent home for the summer.  Some pots held multiple plants, so I separated them as gently as possible and gave each plant it's own space.  I ended up with a row on either side of the bed spaced about a foot apart and had three plants that I spaced out down the middle row.  In this middle row I generously planted parsnip seeds in the large gaps between the celery seedlings in the hopes that they will provide me with a good supply of tasty root veggies in the winter.