Growing at the Speed of Life - A Year in the Life of My First Kitchen Garden

ing to them. And again, gently shift the earth to cover the roots well and then

mist the new arrival.

When it’s time to shift the starts outdoors, the plants may need to be hard­
ened off. This takes about 1 week. The plants need to be exposed to wind and sun

after their greenhouse home, but they should be sheltered from direct sun and

need less watering , never more! They need oxygen around their roots, and over­

watering starves them of air and makes their leaves go yellow.

Seed packets list the amount of sun needed and how to sow the seeds, includ­

ing distance apart and depth. This is all well and good, but like everything in our
nanosecond world, the information is too abbreviated.

I wanted more—really, as much as I could take! Fortunately, I found the

Harvest to Table website (www.harvesttotable.com) and the admirable Stephen

Albert, who has boldly gone where nobody (that I can find) has gone before: he

has listed more than 30 need-to-know specifications that help the novice and

expert alike. For all my selections, I had done 6 weeks of research on my 60 plants
before even ordering his Kitchen Garden Grower’s Guide. I could have saved so

much time, but it is a great source for confirming sometimes confl icting data!

In my first year, I adopted a kind of all-at-once approach to sowing directly

into the raised bed just after Memorial Day. I marked out rows 4 inches apart

across my 3-foot-wide beds and sowed carrot, parsnip, Swiss chard, and beets.

They all flourished and left no room for weeds, but they were so diffi cult to thin!
I talked this over with Scott Titus, and we decided to change the direction

MY NEED-TO-KNOW LIST • 33