When I first started gardening,
my idea of what a vegetable garden would look like in early June in zone 5
was very different than this.
It included tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and other crops just getting started,
bit I didn't imagine such an abundance of food ready to harvest
this early in the season.
Today I thought I’d talk about changes we’ve made over the years
so that our garden is bursting with life in early June
instead of just getting started.
Many years ago, we never even considered planting out the garden
until mid-May - a couple weeks after the last frost,
but when we decided to grow more of our own food,
we started planting cold hardy crops well before the last frost,
according to the instructions on seed packets
and in books like Mel Bartholemew's "Square Foot Gardening".
We started planting beets, carrots, sugar snap peas, lettuce, spinach,
turnips, kale, and collards in late March to early April,
3 to 6 weeks before the last frost.
We planted potatoes in mid-April.
By mid-May, when we used to just be getting started,
the garden was already well on it’s way,
with only tomatoes, peppers, eggplants,
squash, beans, and other cold sensitive crops left to plant.
We then pushed planting dates even earlier
after discovering Eliot Coleman’s methods of season extension.
By starting cold hardy crops in cold frames,
hoop houses, and even cold frames inside hoop houses,
we found that we could plant kale, collards, spinach, and lettuce as early as February,
which led to very early harvests
and an abundance of crops by this time of year.
Coleman also introduced us to new cold hardy crops like claytonia, mache, and minutina
that can survive the entire winter and provide excellent harvests in spring.
We're still enjoying this claytonia that was planted last August
and this mache that was planted very early this spring.
Our next step toward food abundance in spring
was when we realized that we could let these cold hardy crops go to seed
and that many of them would self-sow, producing a whole new crop
with very little effort on our part.
Many of the plants you see here are flowering or going to seed,
but this bed is still producing more food than we can eat.
Finally, much like self-sowing annuals,
early season edible perennials have
greatly increased our harvests this time of year.
We started harvesting red veined sorrel and Egyptian walking onions in March,
French sorrel and Good King Henry in April,
oregano and chives in May,
and strawberries in June.
Of all of these measures, perhaps the most important takeaway is this:
If you live in an area that has cold winters and want to grow more food,
don’t wait until after the last frost to get your garden started.
There are many crops that can be planted outside, including
arugula, beets, carrots, claytonia, collards,
kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, mache, mustard greens, onion,
peas, potatoes, radishes, spinach, and turnips.
Just follow planting instructions on seed packets
or in books like “Square Foot Gardening”.
After doing this, you can push planting dates even earlier with
cold frames and hoop houses,
experiment with new cold hardy crops and self sowing annuals,
and plant more early season edible perennials.
All of these measure will have you harvesting crops
at a time you might otherwise be just getting started.
If you'd like to see the crops that I harvested for today's dinner,
please continue to watch through the end of the video.
Well, that's all for now.
Thank you very much for watching,
and until next time remember
you can change the world one yard at a time.