Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Seeding peas and beets

The weekend was rather blustery, so we spent time indoors and baked a raspberry-saskatoon pie. I also went to Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton's first annual general meeting.


The weather has come around this week and I've started planting. I put in three rows of sugar beets in the back bed in the foreground. I will thin these as the season goes on so I get a few monsters for sugar in the late summer and few early ones for eating.


In the backyard, we finished the second pea trellis trellis last week and I planted peas. The left trellis has pea seeds I save from last year while the right trellis has pea seeds I bought--we'll see how that goes. I also planted about 50 feet of beets in front of the peas (a mixed packet of heirloom types) for eating and pickling.


The garlic is up about four inches and the kale has germinated in the cold frames. By contrast, the garlic in the regular bed has not moved at all! Tonight I started digging holes for potatoes. We'll stop in at Apache tomorrow and pick some up. The next big tasks is lifting some sod out front and digging a bit for a new bed.

3 comments:

  1. Well done, Bob and Jess! Are your raised beds out in a back lane? Great use of space. That pie looks super tasty - we made on last weekend it was gone in a flash. Summer berries pulled from the freezer are such a treat at this time of year when all is brown and bleak. I wanted to go the OFRE's AGM meeting but couldn't due to a conflict, but I plan to get involved as a volunteer picker this year, though.

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  2. Sherri: yes, I have five raised beds behind the garage or on the berm between the drive and the alley. Lots of sun off the garage and otherwise useless space. Occasionally stuff goes missing but I can afford to lose and onion or two--this year beets should make a much less inviting target!

    The OFRE meeting was very nicely done and I'm looking forward to being a fruit captain again this summer. The cherries for the pie I'll make this weekend are from a pick we did back in August: http://gardeningwithjess.blogspot.ca/2012/08/operation-fruit-rescue-edmonton-cherries.html

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  3. Awesome! :) I"m really excited to help out this year.

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