Planting Our 2020 Fall Harvest

And away we go...!

Welcome to Tiny Seeds! The short story: I love to cook and eat, but I’ve never given much effort to growing food (besides #balconyherbs). So this summer, we built a vegetable garden in our backyard in southeast Pennsylvania. I’m tending to it with our 2 1/2-year-old son, Jagger, hoping we can both learn a little something from this earthly experiment.

I’ll post all of our successes and missteps here so you can follow along. If something worked and I have a helpful tip, I’ll let you know about it. If we find or make a great recipe with something from the garden, I’ll share it with you.

Enough with hellos, let’s dig in

We carved out about 600 square feet of garden space in the northeast corner of our yard. It’s fenced on four sides (save for about a three-foot entryway that I have to figure out how to close off) with welded wire that’s four feet high. The morning after we planted our first seeds, a deer made her way into the garden and rammed right through the fence on her way out. Exciting start!

We tilled the existing soil with compost, and a day before planting I mixed in an organic garden fertilizer. Since we didn’t finish the garden until late August, I knew we’d be limited in what we could grow before it gets too cold. I found this Farmer’s Almanac planting calendar, which allows you to type in your zip code to get customized results based on your climate, and saw that I could probably get things like peas, carrots, beets, radishes, chard and lettuce into the ground in time for a mini fall harvest.

To keep things exciting and to try to maximize our chances for a successful first planting, I wanted to buy some specialty seeds from a non-industrial source. A little googling led me to Rohrer Seeds, a seed company and gardening-supplies center in Lancaster County. With 23 varieties of carrot seeds alone, Rohrer sent me down a rabbit hole (hehe) of heirloom veggies. Here’s what wound up in my cart, which we drove to Lancaster to pick up the next day:

• Chiogga beets

• French babette carrots

• French breakfast radishes

• Peppermint Swiss chard

• Amish deer tongue lettuce

• Strike peas

We also had some packets of dill seed and gai lan (Chinese broccoli) from a friend, so we made room for a few rows for those, too. Jags helped me plant a little of everything (his favorite were the big peas, which we plopped down into inch-deep holes we made with our fingers) and give all the seeds a shower from the garden hose afterward.

I made a spreadsheet to keep track of what we planted, when we planted it, and what the estimated dates are for thinning and harvesting. All of that info is printed on the back of every seed packet, but this is first time I’ve ever paid attention to any of it. Gardening!

We’re four days in and already beginning to see sprouts shooting up from the ground. Up next: Thinning the seedlings.