Gardeners' Holidays 2026: First Sowing (and accidental First Picking)

Spring is officially here, with weather to match: sunshine and highs in the 60s yesterday and today. And with the arrival of spring comes the planting of the peas, our first crop of the year to be sown directly into the soil. But before we could put the peas in the ground, we had to prepare the ground to receive them. When we put the garden to bed last December, we didn't really bother pulling out all the remnants of last year's crops: roots left in the dirt, stems clinging to the trellises, and leaves scattered across the surface of the beds. All that had to be removed to make room for this year's crops, along with the few early weeds that had already started to sprout.

As we worked, we made a few discoveries—some pleasant, some less so. One of the pleasant ones was that our efforts last year to add more organic matter to the beds have already made a noticeable difference. The soil we pulled debris out of was dark, rich, and crumbly, not dense and compacted like it was the year before, and it filled the beds nearly to the top. There was barely enough room to add one bucket of our homemade compost to each bed without overflowing the edges. And when I poked my finger into the dirt to plant the seeds, it went in easily to the second knuckle.

But while the soil looked highly satisfactory, the light level did not. It was nearly noon when we started working, and roughly half the garden was still in shade. Most of this, as best we could tell, was coming from the one large tree in our yard, a scrubby cedar growing at the back right corner of the garden area. It's not clear whether we can legally remove this tree; if its trunk is more than 6 inches in diameter, we can't take it down without a permit from the borough (and if we did, we'd be required to replace it with another tree somewhere on the property, which would be difficult to accommodate). But we can certainly limb it up—that is, cut off the lower branches, some of which are not merely shading but physically impinging on the garden area. Doing that will give the garden a bit more sunlight and, we hope, improve the yields from the nearby beds.

Another pleasant discovery we made was that some of our crops from last year had overwintered. We found a few scattered scallions, some undersized leeks, and a few tiny heads of lettuce and arugula poking up through the soil. Since most of the spaces occupied by these crops won't need to have anything else planted in them for another month or so, we decided to leave them there and see if they get big enough to harvest. At least, that was the plan. Unfortunately, I got a little too aggressive with the stirrup hoe and accidentally uprooted one of the wee bunches of arugula. So, rather than let it go to waste, we cleaned it off and added it to last night's salad. 

Thus, this spring Gardeners' Holiday turned out to be not just a celebration of our first sowing of the year, but our first picking, too. I'm choosing to take that as an auspicious sign that our 2026 garden is going to produce early and often.