Northeast Trial Garden Journal - by Jay Leshinsky

The Middlebury College student garden interns and I are well into this year's seed trials for Renee's Garden. Our main focus over the 7 years at this location is building soil fertility with compost and green manures. Middlebury College produces tons of compost from food prep materials, leaves, wood chips and cardboard gathered from on campus. We use the compost to enrich our sandy, stony soil.

One of our summer volunteers, Abel is spreading compost on one of our raised beds. The plant growing in the background is yellow sweet clover which we plant for our bees and for soil improvement. This is the second year we trialed our new Gourmet Golden Beets. Golden Beets are one of our main crops and the old varieties were often inconsistent in their germination and yield. Gourmet Golden Beets outperformed all other golden varieties. Our customers love them! There was even great competition from the Dining Service chefs to obtain our beet green thinnings.

Our mesclun lettuce and baby spinach has benefited from the cold, wet spring here in Vermont. Our yields were heavy and the taste superb! This spring we used predominantly Farmer's Market Blend and Monet's Garden for our lettuce and Catalina for our spinach. Two of this summers interns David and Jessie have just harvested the second cutting from our first planting of lettuce and our second planting (to the right in the photo) will be ready in a few days. Once we harvest the mesclun, we wash it in our well water and then spin it dry in our 2 gallon salad spinner.

Molly, one of the other summer interns, is doing some taste testing before she spins the cleaned lettuce.We are getting our first really hot and sunny weather and our warm weather crop are finally getting some good growth. More on those in my next blog.

Don't miss our featured website article for July :
Growing Vertical Vegetables