Garden update and First Harvest!!!!

Today, we harvested the lettuce heads from the garden. They have developed into very large and tall green structures, replete with rich green leaves. Of the 9 saplings that I started indoors, 6 of them made it to the garden bed, and 5 of which survived into maturity. Each head of lettuce is between 2 to 3 pounds in weight. Overall around 14 pounds of lettuce was harvested. The lettuce heads were quite leafy, and free from much pest damage. Apparently, the dragon flies have really done their jobs over here. The surprising point to note here is that the overall space that the lettuce took was about a quarter of a garden bed, or roughly .25 square meters. There is perhaps more than a month worth of salad greens here for one person.


The area in garden bed 2 that was previously devoted to the lettuce crop was immediately sown with an Northern Indian variety of Lentil seeds and covered with leaf mulch to conserve moisture and to prevent soil erosion. The lentils will mature and yield a continuous harvest through summer and early fall, after which it'll be turned over and replanted with beets and/or turnips for an early winter harvest in November. Thus a continuous and intensive flow of foodstuffs out of the garden can be provided from March to November. What is more miraculous is that such a small area of soil will be able to maintain it's fertility while producing so much food.

In other areas of the garden, several crops are getting ready to produce. The Onions will be ready for a continuous harvest within a week. The early maturing Roten Red Potatos will be ready for harvest within 2 weeks. All of the potatoes will be harvested within 4 weeks and a second potato crop would need to be sown for an early October harvest. The tomato plants are producing dozens of small green tomatoes at this point. Maturation of those tomatoes will occur beginning in July, thus providing a continuous tomato harvest until early October. The beans, I'm not expecting to see a crop until mid July at the earliest. The eggplants will be even later.

Now that my organic garden has entered it's primary production phase, I have been expecting a good deal of damage from the usual depredations of marauding children. And so far they have not failed to live up to expectations. Several days ago, someone passed by the garden and tore up 2 corn plants and incurred significant damage to 3 potato plants. Thus 10% of my corn crop is now lost. It was obvious that this person had intended to kill the potato plants as well. One thing that I have observed however is that Potatoes are extremely hardy, within 3 days, the significant leaf damage done by the trespassers have been completely repaired by the plant itself, all 3 of the damage potatoes have fully recovered. For the gaping areas left by the corn plants, chick pea seeds were immediately sown as a cover crop and leaf mulch applied at once. The chick peas be ready for harvest around August. There needs to be some measure of security for the garden to prevent future human raiders.