March & Coleman's veg begins

 Dear Garden Lovers,

Here are some updates on what's been going on this month in the community garden!

Take a look at some of the winter veggies we have growing beside the usual winter Broadbeans : Kale, Chard, Sprouts and more. Click on the photo to enlarge it and to peer at the Purple Sprouting Broccoli.

Next, we have our Eliot Coleman "market gardening in Paris in 1875" project, which I will just call "the Coleman project". It's from the Coleman Winter Gardening book we all were reading in February. 

We are very very closely spacing the seeding of radish, turnip and later carrots, to imitate the very densely planted market gardens of Paris (which had the benefits of tons and tons of horse manure, which we must do with seaweed instead).

To this end, we have use very precise spacing techniques, and a giant green "dibbler" to space radishes at 2 and a quarter inches, and turnip at four and a half inches. It is already sprouting, if you lift up the floating row covers!

Click on the photo to enlarge this collage.

The hope is to produce lots of food in very little space, a topic also hit upon in Linda Gilkeson's latest newsletter . 

It is so cool to experiment with, and very fun to see the results so far! Huge thanks to Jim for thinking it all through, and organizing us to do it, all the while producing seedlings for the upcoming plant sale; amazing!

Comments welcome and will post more photos as the first, densely planted, spring crops come up. I'm kind of excited about two different colours of radishes too!