Spring Goodness=Lettuce and Flowers

On the last day of March, we enjoyed our first lettuce from the garden. The lettuce was planted at the beginning of February in a hot bed made by digging up a patch of dirt, burning a pile of brush on top of it, raking the soil even, scattering the seed and putting a cover of plastic over it to keep in the heat.

This photo of the lettuce bed was taken about 2 weeks ago. The lettuce has grown significantly since then with the warm days we've had scattered amidst the rain.

This picture shows the hand-dug garden patch. We have 4 other gardens this year; this is the smallest yet it often out-produces the others because we garden it intensively. There is no wasted space here, no long open rows for a rototiller. This garden is hand-dug (by Larry this year; last year I did it), planted closely, rotated often, hand-weeded and mulched. This year I am considering planting the upper garden to strawberries because we've had such problems with deer eating our plants.

In another garden, you can barely make out the peas and onions coming up. This was taken last week and they are much bigger now, and the peas have their climbing fence in place (chicken wire attached to poles). The beets are up too, despite Otis' best efforts to dig them up. An electric fence now surrounds this garden, and Otis stays a LONG way away!

A view of the abundant daffodils. My favorite flowers, I do believe. You notice the odd bloom on the pear tree? I think the top must have been nipped by frost, but the lower 3/4 of the tree is blooming nicely.

There is nothing quite like the first salad, the first green of the new season. We will have salad almost every night now for a while, but none of the succeeding bowls will come close to the first taste of Spring.

It will be quite a few weeks before we have anything else from the garden except onions, radishes and herbs. But we can wait. We have lettuce to remind us that the gardens will soon be bountiful once again.