It's still pretty bleak out there.
It's getting close to seed-starting time, so I've been going back into the garden to see what I've got and to figure out how to maximize productivity over the coming season. One of the nice things about having a vegetable garden is that unlike a landscape garden, you can reinvent it from scratch every year at very little cost. If you don't like something you planted last year, you just plant something else. Right now, the garden is down to just a few herb and strawberry plants, leaving the rest of the beds a blank canvas just waiting for spring.
This year, I have two specific goals:
1) to generate a constant supply of salad greens throughout the year, and
2) to plant specific crudite vegetables for the annual Halloween party.
The first goal comes from a profound desire to eat some kind of salad other than iceburg with ranch. Oh, for a butterhead lettuce salad tossed with parsley and chervil and dill, and a light vinaigrette, and little toasts on the side spread with chevre... *weeps* My manifesto for this summer will be: tasty salads or starvation! I will refuse to eat any iceburg lettuce after May 15th.
I know that the second goal is quite a few months off, but I'm already planning for it. I'm so sick of seeing pictures of these beautiful, fancy, fresh organic baby vegetable platters and then going to the store and finding out that the baby vegetables cost three times as much as normal vegetables. Thanks, but no thanks... at those prices, I'll just grow them myself!
The biggest obstacle is going to be space... as usual, I want to grow far more than I can fit into my tiny plot. I have the end of April to figure it out, though, and I'm determined to make it work out somehow. So away from the keyboard and back to the planning notebook I go!
