Wide row gardening and bok choy

By Rose Hansen, July 27, 2015

I’m backdating this a bit, but I’ve got good reason for the delay. For the past several weeks, we’ve been living out in the sticks, way out down in the country, in a hollow so remote that I can barely pick-up the NPR station out of Tulsa on my FM radio in the kitchen. We don’t have TV. Jon’s cellphone doesn’t work.

And we certainly don’t have no internet.

I’m indulging a bit by hooking up my cell phone, which does work, (yay, Verizon!), to my laptop and gobbling up the data.

I’ve done a fairly good job cataloging my garden, so I’ll try catching y’all up over the next few days/weeks, etc.

In my last post, I whined and bitched about my solarizing efforts failing completely.

Way-ell… that was only partially true.

Once it got hot, which took several weeks because we’re having the strangest summer weather of all time, the grass under the plastic did die.  Eventually. But more on that later.

My early crops, before the weather turned unseasonably cold and rainy and flooded everything out, were perfect.

I experimented with something called “wide-row gardening” this year. Instead of planting crops into monotonous 2-foot wide rows, I blocked out big sections of my garden of 4-6 feet with 2 ft. wide walkways. I did a lot of research into complimentary plants; brassicas, for example, supposedly benefit from the protections of lettuce against cabbage moths, etc. So what I suppose would be called my “greens” rows, I filled the gaps between cabbages and broccolis with leaf lettuce.

It was so bright and beautiful as it began to grow and fill in that I really struggled with picking and thinning at all.

My bok choy crop was awesome. We ate it for weeks.

Happy campers, we were. For a time.