The Restaurant Garden The Race with Mother Nature…Game on!!

The first bench mark for planting a New England garden has come to pass and we are still frantically planting our garden starts and seeds. You get caught up with what you got going and almost lose track of what needs to be accomplished. Every day we put together a work sheet with headings that include;
plantings
succession planting
weeding
plant care
compost chores
pest control
and greenhouse work
Every day seems to feature a laundry list of reminders in each category.

It’s funny, Joe and I have learned to pick our battles from time to time, not that any are chosen to lighten our day. Our picks are things we have some control over. Yesterday was a day to weed the Big Garden East. That involves hoeing the rows around the plants, then running the rototiller between the rows. Each row is 56′ long and by the way, there are 11 of them. Today we place more of our plant-able starts into the Big Garden West and the Teardrop Garden.

The Big Garden West will feature an array of sweet and hot Italian peppers. Mild and hot chile peppers including, Highlander and Joe E Parker Anaheim Chiles.

The Teardrop Garden is begging to be showered with Masai French Beans, Purple Tomatillos, Cippolini onions, a succession row or two of spinach, pole beans and another try of carrots in the southeast side (conducive to draining) of the garden. Over Friday and Saturday we received another dose of Mother Natures “I’m in Charge” weather.

A good friend of ours offered these solar panels pulled from his dad’s indoor pool roof in Maine. They came in mighty handy as we placed them over our newly planted Masai French Beans to nice results. Check out our post rain pic.

This is my first year with both Shallots and Potatoes, as mentioned in previous blogs and by the pictures you can see the shallots are going well but our potato sets had suffered severe losses to rot from our earlier 3″ rain storm.

But even today, we harvested lettuce from our fence row and from our mesclun patch. This will be introduced to a little of my home made fresh lemon vinaigrette. It’s Lisa’s favorite taste memory from Paris. Comment if you would like the recipe!

Lastly, I use an unbelievable program that allows me to keep track of all the plants we introduce to our garden space. It is from motherearthnews.com. Click on garden planner and follow all the tutorials. I introduced the planning program to a couple of restaurant regulars. They played with it for three days to get comfortable with the format and reported they brought their garden to a new level from the years before. There is a 30 day free trial, so plan away. Take a look and decide for yourself, use it if you need it or put it on hold until next year. One very cool and unexpected feature was receiving an e-mail from Mother Earth News with succession planting reminders with the exact varietals  I chose for the Restaurant Garden. See you all around the Tomato Stakes!