Our Seventh Raised Bed Wasn’t My Idea!

The Brit has decided we need a new bed for salad greens and herbs with an easy-off top that will make the plants more easily accessible than in Fort Knox.

So off we went to Lowe’s today to buy wood for a (small!) four-by-four bed, plus the plastic pipes that will support the chicken-wire cover (including a top). The frame is done, as you can see, and the rest will be done sometime in the next week or so, around work and travel. He’s got some elaborate plan for soil mixture, courtesy of Square-Foot Gardening, though he says he is looking for a more sustainable alternative to peat moss. Feel free to weigh in. I think it’s all yet another attempt to find a way to win against the squirrels with strawberry plants.

On Saturday, we harvested some leeks that had fattened up over the winter. Yum! They were skinny seedlings, about the thickness of a blade of grass, packed in a four-pack that he found in Michigan last May. Not bad…

 

Finally, the garden is looking very green, and I feel like we have filled in the flower beds even more than last year. A few bearded iris have bloomed, and I think the big pop is just a few days away. I’ve spotted a few tiny, bright yellow petticoat-like daffodils, but otherwise they are gone. The creeping phlox also is starting to fade. The big color right now is from the columbines:

purple and white winky-wink columbines

Late Daffodils

The big drifts have faded, no doubt hastened by the heat. But these varieties have been in bloom over the past week or so:

I’m thinking we must have between 10 and 12 varieties of daffodils in the beds. Until we bought the house and started planting, I had no idea there were so many varieties.

April Harvest

We left some Swiss chard and greens under the cold frame all winter and finally harvested them today to use in lasagna instead of frozen spinach. The Brit also pulled out some leeks, which he sauteed “low and slow” in butter, following a recipe from his new Nigel Slater vegetable cookbook. The result is tender leeks with a touch of sweetness, even if the amount of butter was a bit Paula Deen-esque.

Almost makes up for it being so dry that the peas we planted three weeks ago haven’t sprouted (and maybe have been baked in this heat).