Chat: How does your spring garden grow?

It's a great time to grow cool-season veg.

Anthony and I are opening up a chat to all subscribers, both free and paid. We invite your comments and questions on the subject of early spring, cool-season gardening.

If you’re new to Substack’s chat area, let us assure you how easy it is: Whether you’re reading this on your computer or the Substack app on your phone, just click or tap on the link below, and dive in!

We’ll begin by saying that we had to get started on the early spring veg a bit later than usual, due to a prolonged winter here in the Midwest. So on March 26, we sowed the following seeds directly into the garden soil:

• Peas

• Lettuce

• Swiss chard

• Carrots

• Cabbage

• Kale

These are all fairly cold-hardy vegetables that thrive in this early part of the season, before Missouri’s heat and humidity cause them to bolt or wilt. The weather’s been great for them since then, and all six crops are at the “needing to thin” stage now. We’ve also had a few meals from our perennial asparagus bed and are now regularly harvesting perennial herbs such as mint, lemon balm, oregano, and marjoram.

Chickweed pesto… yum.

We’ve enjoyed a bounty from the free “weeds” in our garden—chickweed, henbit, dead nettle, cleavers, and violets. We’ve turned these into pesto, eaten them in salads, and used them to flavor water.

Finally, we scrambled to grab those lilac blossoms while they were up, and I made a batch of lilac syrup and took a trial-run at lilac-lemon marmalade, which I’ll cover in an upcoming post.

If you thought you had to wait until May to garden, think again!

From our archives, here are some posts on early spring-season planting.

If you're not growing carrots, you don't know what's up, doc

This fall, plant the lazy gardener's vegetable: asparagus

Note you can plant asparagus and carrots either in spring or fall.

For cool season success, try growing greens

Now join us in the chat and tell us what’s happening in your little corner of Eden!