The Garden is Coming to Life

It has barely been a month since the official beginning of Spring, but the signs of life returning to the world are everywhere.  The trees are leafing out, the flowers are blooming, the grass is growing lush and green.  In the garden things are starting to emerge too.

The onion sets that I planted a few weeks ago have made their way through the mulch with their tender green spears.  I am always amazed by how quickly onions grow.  In only a few short months I will again have fresh onions for my kitchen.  I still have a few onions left from last year's harvest and if they can keep for a few more months I will have been able to grow enough onions to last me a year in only sixty square feet of growing space.

The potatoes are pushing their way up through the leaves and straw that covered their bed, forming little mounds before finally pushing through.  They will hopefully fill in this bed in short order and I will be well on my way to having fresh potatoes to eat soon.  This year one of my goals is to dehydrate more potatoes for easy dried backpacking meals for my camping adventures.

The peas and radishes have made an appearance in their bed where the wind stripped off the straw mulch that I had put down.  Once things get tall enough to hold the straw in place I will go back and re-mulch this bed.  The carrots that I planted in the row with the radishes should take a bit longer to germinate, but they will be able to fill in the gaps left by the radishes when I harvest them.

In the next bed I have a few turnip or rutabaga seedlings finding their way to the sunlight through the thin layer of straw covering them.  I expect that the lettuce and spinach I also planted there will find their way to the sun in the next few days.  I have been finding an abundance of lettuce volunteers scattered throughout the beds.  They are growing nicely with little help from me.  Because of these volunteers I will be able to have a good harvest of lettuce with literally no work on my part aside from cutting the leaves when they are big enough.

The garlic are growing taller each day.  It might be another month or so before they send up scapes, but by the looks of things, I am expecting a pretty nice harvest.  It looks as though most of the garlic are quite happy and I expect to have some good sized heads by June.

In a few more weeks the weather should be warm enough to start planting my warm weather crops.  It won't long until my garden becomes a regular contributor to my pantry again.  I am looking forward to enjoying the fruits of my labor in the months to come.