On a perfect cool, cloudy, comfortable day, gardeners worked all day long to get seeds and seedlings into the ground. Bed selection and prep, planting techniques, and camaraderie got the job done.
Flower team dug out self-seeding Shasta daisies and ubiquitous dandelions to make room for annual flower seeds. Zinnias and more will grace the tables of gardeners and neighbors the garden shares the bounty with.
This bed gets planted creatively with purple potatoes, delicious haricots verts bush beans, teddy bear sunflowers, and marigolds.
Two rows of beautiful Brussels sprouts seedlings from Kettle Song Farm in Worcester, Vermont, get a bush bean planting on each side of the baby plants. This furrow got Victory Seeds bush beans; the other furrows differ in their days-to-harvest times, which means fresh beans for gardeners and neighbors on and on. Bean bushes will produce until frost, and like other legumes, these plants feed nutrients into the soil. The timing is perfect: the Brussels sprouts will stay in the ground until they’ve been sweetened by a few frosts. Then we’ll harvest them all at once and divide them into shares to go home with gardeners.This experienced gardener draws our attention and appreciation to this legume plant and the white nodule in its roots. Legumes feed the soil. These nodules feed legumes and help ensure the presence of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which garden plants need to grow. Dozens of cucumber seedlings from Pleasant Mount Farm Greenhouse in Huntington, Vermont, as well as a few from a young gardener here who’s experimenting with growing starts at home, line both sides of two trellised rows. We have seeds to direct sow cucumbers to fill in areas where we find gaps.
There are but a few rows and boxes left to plant. There will be succession planting of peas and beans too. But now our energy turns to sustaining all we’ve planted: watering, weeding, watching for critters and mitigating anything that might threaten the crops, and any garden projects that need doing such as wooden planting box repair.
