A new growing season begins

Seeds are in the ground, and a groundhog lurks nearby. Plus: A recipe for ramp pasta.

Happy May! Welcome back to another season of Tiny Seeds, where we’re learning to grow a vegetable garden with the help of a growing 4-year-old. I realize last year’s updates were relatively few and far between; I’m going to try to publish more frequently this year, provided we have something to say and show.

The early spring weather has been pretty cool here in USDA Hardiness Zone 7a, so we held off putting anything in the ground until May 1. This weekend we planted seeds for baby carrots, sugar peas, red beets, kale, mixed herbs and lettuces, endive, green beans, and cucumbers, and we put three types of young tomato plants in the garden: Pink Brandywine, Fourth of July, and Sungolds. We’ll add squash and eggplant once the weather’s a bit warmer. (Special shout-out to readers Carrie and Ralph J. for our metal row markers, a major upgrade from the flimsy plastic ones we’d been using.)

Using a data set of exactly two times, gardening with Jagger has seemed to be more fruitful and fun this year than last year. At planting time last year I wrote about him becoming potty-trained in the non-harvest season. Which was awesome! But not much use in the garden. This year he has enough deftness with his little fingers to put seeds in their intended rows, and his attention span is just long enough to water the actual soil with the garden hose now, not spraying indiscriminately at people and pests. (There was one moment when he soaked me and I was annoyed and felt myself getting angry. But I saw him laughing and told myself I’d rather him remember that than me yelling at him. So I laughed, too, and we kept going.)

We would happily spray the chunky groundhog who’s been bouncing around our yard the past few weeks. He hasn’t seemed interested in the garden — yet. But we read online that hot pepper is a decent deterrent (because shooting or trapping him are just not happening) so we sprinkled some crushed pepper flakes around — homegrown from last year’s harvest! — to keep him from our goods.

While we wait for the garden to grow, Teri and I have been enjoying one of our favorite spring things — wild ramps. We made ramp pesto and ramp butter, but the coolest creation was bright-green ramp pasta. To make it, you blanch and chop ramp leaves and incorporate them into pasta dough. I saw a few methods for this — mostly with spinach as the green element — and landed on this one from Vitamix that forms a dough in a blender. I’d never done that before and was super skeptical it would work, but work it did. And ramp fettuccine tossed with ramp butter? 10/10 highly recommend.

Until next time — soon — thank you for reading. EB