(V is for) Victory Farms

Breaking Ground Once Again...

Last year, I thought I’d have my act more together than this year. And I did. Sort of.

We took advantage of this nice weekend to get around to the business of planting. I unmulched the garlic and I’m pleased to report, it looks great. Pics tk, of course. Because I’d did my broad forking last fall, all we really had to do with the rest of the beds was unmulch them. Thank goodness, because all this planting was really time-consuming.

I should back up. I ordered my seeds a bit late, too. March, not early February. I missed out on some things. And this year we tried out a lot of new companies. Some delivered and some disappointed. My potatoes literally came sooo late in the season. Or I thought they did (more on this later!). My cannellini beans never came. And I had to order from at least 10 different companies to get everything I wanted (and needed).

Ten invoices, a bag of innoculate, seed potatoes covered in the wrong kind of sulfur, and one sunny weekend later, we were ready to plant. Confession: I get totally intimidated by planting because, truthfully, it involves more strategy than chess. You have to worry about what goes with what, what HATES what, and what will deter the right kind of pests (Ha! Much, much more about this later!).

I was also determined to have a real spring garden. Again, I was a bit late to the game, but I wanted to enjoy all all the early-bird specials, if you will, in terms of vegetables. It’s a bit tough to figure out as you have to determine also what is truly ready to go into the garden (and withstand the possibly dicey weather).

That said, Curt, Michele, and I planted blue potatoes, Russian fingerling potatoes, arugula, mizuna mustard greens, tango lettuce, garbanzo beans, fava beans, provider beans, two kinds of peas, golden beets, Detroit dark red beets, French breakfast radishes, another kind of radish, and two kinds of carrots (scarlet nantes and, um, something else).

I also started up the starters a while back, tomatoes — green zebra, red brandywine, purple cherokee, amish paste, roma, old German, and valencia, cauliflower, purple tomatilloes, tomatilloes verde, marigolds, cilantro, parsley, catnip, oregano, Genovese basil, sweet basil, eggplant, sweet chocolate peppers, hot Thai peppers, jalapenos, another kind of pepper (it’s late, we’re watching the SATC movie — lame, by the way — and I can’t remember), rosemary, two kinds of lavendar, Russian tarragon (I know now that this is the not-so-great kind), eggplant, and, um, hmmm…I think that’s it for the starters.

It was a rewarding and exciting weekend as I think we all felt like we were really into spring. Also, this post is as lame as Carrie and her dumbass friends because it’s really a full month later and I don’t recall the joy of planting because the pain of battling pests has overwhelmed me.