Planted April 4

We just finished putting in cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, collard greens and bright lights chard. All but the chard are plants that we couldn’t resist buying this morning at the feed store where we picked up chick feed — they are so much further along than our own plants. And we hadn’t planted the chard yet (we have been busy and are behind on lots of things; we intended to have it in a month ago). It is at the end of the garden which gets the most shade, with cabbage at the end getting the most sun (at least 2 hours or more a day than the chard end which is near a tree).

Chard is shade-tolerant; cabbage needs full-sun (but can’t tolerate heat). This particular variety of chard (Seed Savers) is supposed to be very tolerant of lots of things and to keep producing for a long season. The plants we bought this morning could be any variety – they were sold as simply ‘broccoli’, ‘cabbage’, etc.

Josh is also soaking about 40 beet seeds, 20 chiogga and 20 kestrel. He started with so many because they are older seeds (3 years) and so you never know what you will actually get. All 40 would be great, of course – if we can’t eat them immediately I will pickle them.

They will go in the ground tomorrow, maybe with some borax after I do a bit of research to find out how “organic” borax is…I honestly have no idea. My grandfather grew amazing, huge beets and he said that his success was due to putting a bit of borax in the soil around each one. I don’t have time to look it up right now; Josh is waiting for me to start building the box for a patio herb garden.

Once we get the beets in our new plot will look like this:

** Borax is safe to use and recommended for several root crops in organic gardens. This article is really useful — it suggests organic alternatives to traditional fertilizer needs/soil deficencies. Apparently, borax is also good for sunflowers, another plant that I am definitely planning to grow.