Even the Wall Street Journal is getting into the gardening act. A couple days ago , the WSJ featured an article about suburban homeowners tearing up their green lawns to establish gardens. Can’t blame them—it’s tough to eat grass. With the rising price of food, gardening makes more sense now than ever. Yet, the WSJ article told of neighbors who complained of having to look at brown earth rather than green grass. What about those hungry people who complain of having too look at vast expanses of inedible green lawns? No mention of that.
I’m working on a small garden now and I’m remembering the problems we had last year when everything matured at mostly the same time. I managed to can a large number of hot peppers but not much else. I gave as much away as I could but some was wasted. This year, I am planning to engage in “succession planting” whereby you schedule maturation in a more orderly fashion.
I planted some tomato varieties by looking at the maturation dates. “Early girl” tomatoes are just that….expected to mature in about 60 to 65 days. There are other varieties which take longer to mature so you can plant some of each type.
With early vegetables like peas, lettuce, spinach, radishes and others, you can plant in short beds with planting intervals scheduled every two weeks until the weather gets too warm. Be sure to rotate what you plant and to rip up all the old vegetables the minute they begin to bolt.
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