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Spring Harvest at the One Acre Vegetable Garden

Whoa! It seems like just yesterday we were getting the One Acre Vegetable Garden ready for spring planting and now it’s time to harvest the lettuces, spinach, kale, Swiss chard and collards. This is a transition period as the spring veggies are replaced with summer favorites.

English peas are one of my favorite springtime treats and they, along with the snow and snap peas, are starting to come on. I can’t wait for some steamed peas with melted butter, salt and pepper.

The cool season herbs like parsley, dill and cilantro are also ready to harvest.

We have begun planting the early tomatoes, nestling them among the peas so we can use the same supports when the peas fade and the tomatoes start to vine.

The lettuces are growing in rows on each side of the pea fencing and as we harvest them, we plant bush beans. By early summer, lettuce and peas will make way for bush beans and tomatoes. Garlic chives will share bed space with some of the tomatoes because they are reputed to stop some of the tomato diseases.

In preparation for when the weather really warms up, we put two varieties of sweet potatoes in sand to make slips for planting later this season and we’re seeding cucumbers to grow up the teepee. This should be interesting since we mistakenly planted beets along each side of the teepees! I'm afraid that if we’re not careful to keep the cucumbers going up, the beets will get smothered. 

The potatoes we planted in March are up and looking good. As you may recall I was worried that we got a late start on those. 

The insectary has come back from seeds dropped last year and looks like a carpet of green. We added cornflowers and marigolds to the mix this year, and we’re also trying some groundcover-type petunias and alyssum. The idea is to create a frothy carpet of blooms around the base of the taller plants. 

And finally, we are planting nasturtiums around the bottoms of the asparagus to add some color to those rows and to harvest the edible blooms.