COVID19: Visit with Mom and Dad and Garden Planning

I visited with Mom and Dad yesterday, and wow! I feel better. After cold weather since Christmas and various other unavoidable circumstances, we haven't been able to have a substantial visit since Christmas, so I was ready. They've been vaccinated with both sets of COVID shots and are now covered and safe from the virus. Hooray. 

Hopefully, Jack and I will get called to the front before long. He turned 60 mid-January and should be in the next cohort. 

Dad and I are planning to plant a garden this year, so we brainstormed on that a little bit. Ideas are beginning to gel, but a clear vision hasn't yet emerged from the thick growth of sweet corn, banana peppers, and lush okra in my imagination. 

The spot I've picked out is pretty big - more than 1/2 acre - and so are my aspirations, but this first year will focus on building a good base of soil, planting things we know how to grow, and figuring out how to best do the things we want to do. I want to make a strawberry patch, plant a few figs, blueberry bushes, and get some fruit trees going between the house and the cemetery. 

Unless you've ever been to the farm, that last sentence doesn't make sense, but it's going to look good. 

I'll try to keep blog posts brief when possible. I think Mom had to put a bookmark in the last one.

Have a great week as we bid fond farewell to another month of 2021. 

COVID19: Food Will Win the War

During the first World War, the concept of "victory gardens" or "war gardens" was introduced in a proposal by George Washington Carver as a way to decrease the pressure on the public food supply. Here in the United States but most especially across Europe, food production was substantially decreased because much of the usual agricultural workforce was fighting the war.

The goal was to encourage every family to grow a garden and for gardens to be placed in public spaces. 

During both the first and second World Wars, victory gardens spread across the land and around the globe. Victory gardens became popular in Canada in 1917 after the Ministry of Agriculture promoted "A Vegetable Garden for Every Home."

In March 1917, the U.S. National War Garden Commission was established and a war garden campaign was launched. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed, "Food will win the war."

Read more about victory gardens on Wikipedia here.

Back when the isolation recommendation came down back in March and everybody was panicking about what we might or might not be able to buy from the grocery store, I said, "We need to plant a little victory garden," and ordered us some seeds from the Burpee website. 

Black-seeded Simpson lettuce, a romaine mix, arugula, and radish seeds arrived in the mail a couple of weeks later. Jack scratched the old weeds and new poison ivy sprouts out of the little bed by our driveway, and we planted two little rows of lettuce, a couple splashes of radishes, and an edging of arugula. We added some of the fertilizer Dad gave us and waited for the rain to fall.

Here's what it looked like a couple of days ago.

It needs a bit of weeding, but the lettuces are growing well, and we've harvested three little salads. At the right of the photo, you can see more little rows of sprouted greens which are three and a half weeks behind this first planting. We're super-proud of how they're growing.

The radishes have been a bit of a disappointment. We had ONE get round an radish-y, but the rest have merely grown busy top-parts with no radish formation underneath. We do have a new variety of radish - rat's tail radishes - which are grown not for the root but for the seed pod. We're still waiting to see exactly what those are going to produce, but the harvest so far really looks like a rat's tail.

Stay tuned for a photo of those in the coming days!