Weeding

It has been a while since I was out in the garden but last night went out to do a little weeding and see how everything was looking.  The top bed wasn’t bad for weeds because it was just recently planted but the bottom and middle bed were just full of them.

I was able to hoe around the garlic and shallots but needed to hand weed most of the carrots and parsnips.  They are only planted a foot apart so they are pretty close.  Depending on how they perform through out the season will have to rethink my spacing.  The carrots look like they had about a 70% germination rate and the parsnips about the same maybe a little better.  It is a shady area with just average soil, no manure was worked in, and so I am satisfied with it.  I did have trouble with weeding the parsnips because I don’t actually know what they look like.  I still weeded them though (there was a consistent straight line of plants that looked similar in appearance to carrots) I deduced that these where the parsnips and if I’m wrong I guess I will find out when I go to harvest them.

The middle bed is looking great.  I cut some kale this morning for a co-worker and then more tonight.  Going to try and make smoky kale chips, basically kale little smoked paprika, olive oil, pinch on salt and them bake in the oven. Leeks are getting bigger and the onions are enormous.  All of those onions where planted in the fall and in the spring they weren’t looking that good, but the snow had just left the ground.  Now they look terrific and all happen to be going to seed.  Depending on how they do I might start to plant them in the fall along with the garlic. 

The bok choy, spinach and lettuce are also looking good.  The spinach and lettuce in the containers are easily doing 2-3 times better than the stuff planted in the actual garden.  Greens are now destined for the contaniers.

The bok choy actually looks like I thought it should now.  It is larger than the baby stuff in the grocery stores but not as big as the mature stuff.  It is starting to bolt and go to seed though, I think the 4-5 days last week of +25C weather caused it.  It is almost around the size I was planning to eat it at so should ready anytime.

Of all the weeds I pulled the most prevalent was grass and the second was tomato plants. Where I had the tomato plants last year there was oodles of them, and even in places where I didn’t have them previously planted and just added some compost there was still tons of them.

Also forgot to mention that the potatoes I planted 5 days ago have sprouted.

I did take a bunch of pictures yesterday, but the camera left with the family and will not be back for a couple days