Once again, we’ll be providing semi-regular updates on the status of this year’s vegetable garden. Last winter, we grew a cover crop consisting of clover, fava beans, and vetch in our two raised beds. Cover crops have several benefits, including improving and preserving soil quality, preventing erosion, and suppressing weeds. In addition, we enjoy the look of lush, green growth in our raised beds all winter long. I tilled the cover crop under in March, which gave us nice, rich soil for planting in late April.

Last year’s crop was our best ever with copious tomatoes and zucchini and a record number of peppers. This year, we’re hoping to improve on that with a renewed focus on salad greens, spinach, radishes, and carrots. To that end, we started by covering our beds with a product called Reemay, which is a lightweight, polyester fabric that allows 75% light transmission and frost protection. It also provides a rudimentary pest barrier for seedlings. My dad swears by this stuff! So we decided to give it a try this year, too. So far, so good — the greens, radishes, and carrots are all off to a strong start. Jen also planted a couple zucchini plants and several pole bean plants from seed this year.

In addition, we’ve got six tomato plants and four pepper plants in the ground, all purchased from Hayhurst Valley Organic Farm & Nursery at the Lane Country Farmers Market. These all appear to be doing well. (We used the Reemay to protect the tomatoes from several frosty mornings recently, too.) If you’re looking for high quality locally grown plants, fruits, and vegetables, do yourself a favor and visit the Farmers Market!

Like last year, we’ll have a single photo album in our gallery that we’ll use to chronicle this year’s garden. An initial set of photos has already been added.

This entry was posted by Steve on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Yard/Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.