Turf Wars: East vs. West
One side of the garden is looking great. Will the other half catch up before it's too late?
I stepped outside Wednesday morning to a chilly 53 degrees. Trying to raise a fall harvest is a race against the clock, and our proverbial timer is set for Oct. 15. That’s when the Farmer’s Almanac estimates the first frost will hit our zip code. Less than a month away. So how’s our garden growing?
Popping in some patches, patchy in others
Happy to report that the peas I talked up in last week’s newsletter continue to stretch skyward. They are, dare I say, thriving. And that’s especially exciting, because I was reading this article about fall gardening from PennLive columnist George Weigel (my mom clipped it out for me — thanks, Mom!), and he wrote that his attempts at growing peas in the fall “have always fizzled.” That sparked the competitive part of me — crossing my fingers and tendrils in hopes that my first-time grower’s luck keeps going through harvest time.
Everything on the east side of our garden — peas, radishes, and gai lan — is looking healthy and vibrant. We also have two rows of dill in this area, but that’s not traditionally a fall-harvest herb, and it takes longer to mature than most of what we planted, so I’m not terribly concerned by its slow progress. I’m thinking these east-side denizens are getting a little more sun than their western peers, which have a partially obstructed sun view due to some branches from a nearby crabapple tree.
Over on the west side, our carrot seedlings (pictured above) seem to have stalled out at 2-3” with not a lot of root development happening. Next door to them, our four rows of deer tongue lettuce have been thinned out to give the heads room to grow, but growing they are not. At least, not a lot. Ditto the Swiss chard and chiogga beets on the other (south) side of the garden’s west end. The chard and beets have very similar-looking seedlings, about 4” tall with thin pink-purple stems leading to one or two pairs of wispy green leaves.
Teri keeps telling me to be patient (“Rome wasn’t build in a day, and neither were its gardens,” she says), and that everything will come up when it’s ready. The race is on.
