Welcome to the 2023 gardening season!! We are back at the community garden again this year! Our spring this year has been quite warm. Many gardeners in our community garden began planting their plots in April. With it being only May, our weather has been unseasonably hot and that has definitely led to some gardening mishaps unfortunately!
Let’s walk through the garden and plant it!
It’s May 5 and the rhubarb is starting to grow. I expected the ground to still be a bit wet from all the snow, but it is rather dry. We are interested in seeing our garlic will grow that we planted in the fall!
Our honeyberry (also known as haskap) bushes are coming back to life. The rabbits ate them over the winter, so I was not sure how well they would do, but they are slowly coming back and I am ecstatic!
Here is our asparagus. Hopefully we will be able to harvest it since it is the second year growing it. We are still new to asparagus growing and are continuing to learn a lot!
It is now May 12, and we have been picking weeds and getting our plot ready to plant! We still haven’t yet noticed our garlic sprouting, but will water it and wait a few more days to see what happens!
We decided to plant most of the garden May 20. With all of the wildfires around Alberta, it has been quite smoky these last few days.
I’m so excited that we got a new bin here at the community garden!! Our other bin was starting to fall apart. Here we planted a few potatoes and some carrots.
The garlic we planted in the fall still has not sprouted so we decided to dig a few cloves up to see what was happening. We ended up having to dig all of the garlic up since it had rotted. It became moldy and mushy. Some cloves were hollow and appeared some creatures feasted on it over the winter. Sadly, we dug up six rows of garlic, about 60 cloves or so and we tossed them away. I was so discouraged to see that we had no garlic growing this spring. With the snow and hot spring, the cloves rotted before they even had a chance. Fellow gardeners had similar issues with their lily bulbs.
Once we dug all the garlic up, we picked the weeds and worked up the ground by hand the best we could and instead, planted onions here.
We planted squash and sunflowers.
We have more asparagus growing.
The rhubarb is growing great. It is still a bit small to pick any, so we will continue to water and wait a bit.
Here’s our garden. We planted carrots, potatoes, squash, sunflowers, and onions. With it being so smoky, we decided to wait a few days and come back to finish planting later, since my eyes were burning from the smoke!
The smoke was so thick, it burned our lungs so we wore our masks. I decided to wear my kerchief too to keep my hair out of my way!
In just a few days, the smoke cleared and we were ready to plant!! Many gardeners finished planting their plots as well. I love gardening so I could hardly wait to get started! Here is our “before”!
Here is our rhubarb. I am not sure what has been eating the leaves (since I never saw any bugs on them) but I see a heart chewed in the leaf!
We planted a few flowers in our garden as well to help attract bees plus it looks pretty. I love pansies and petunias!
The honeyberries (or haskaps) have come back beautifully! There is lots of new growth!
I am so glad that we were able to finish planting our garden comfortably! I love the fresh air and sunset — that gloomy smoke has been terrible!
In our garden box at home (we just had them built), we planted an assortment of herbs like mint, basil, curry, stevia leaf, plus squash, rhubarb and flowers!
By May 29, we planted everything else in our plot at the community garden like lettuce, herbs, beans, beets (a couple varieties), more potatoes and carrots, squash (both patty pans also called sunburst squash and zucchini) as well as cucumbers, and more onions.
Here is our garden now at the end of May — all planted, watered and ready to be tended to all summer so we can enjoy yummy garden goodies!
We have more that we will be planting in our yard and in pots and containers like tomatoes, chives and a few other delicious goodies!
Have you finished planting your garden?
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours