Yesterday I pulled some carrots out of our little raised-bed urban garden. There’s not a whole lot of food left out there, but those carrots were startlingly sweet and flavorful. They should have a different name, they are so far removed from the “carrot” that we find in plastic bags at the supermarket. It seems like we’re cheating somehow, pulling food out of the dirt in November. Do we actually get to do this?
We also still have arugula, which just seems never to die no matter how hard the frost, plus parsley, rosemary, thyme, and some garlic that I’m going to leave in the ground to make more. When I transplanted it, it died down, but then it sprang back about a month ago. You can see it below the drooping leaves of the banana peppers:
Dave and I put together the new garden over the course of the last three days. We are not generally known as being the handy types, so we bought pre-formed cedar boards that come with aluminum pins. The whole thing fits together like a puzzle. We remembered to keep the pins sticking out so we can later put tubing over them to construct a sort of cold frame next spring for early planting. We figure if we make one new garden per year, by about 2019 we won’t have to mow the lawn any more because it will be just about all gone.
I wanted to have a fair amount of control over what goes into the frame, so I bought peat moss, vermiculite, and two kinds of soil (organic because I want it to be organic, and regular topsoil because I’m a cheapskate). We spread them out in layers and then dug around with a small hoe to mix. Already I’m trying to imagine what to plant first, next, next… Sugar snap peas in the early spring, an early crop of carrots, and definitely some more garlic. I wonder if we can get two crops of Japanese turnip. It would be so nice to be pulling it next November.
Alas… the last of the grape tomatoes, frostbitten and forlorn, destined never to ripen:
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