The traditional first plantings of spring are spinach, peas, lettuce, and greens. What gardeners love about them is that they grow very fast in spring, are ready to eat in just over a month, and taste wonderful.

In the past, these crops were often the first taste of something fresh after a winter of dried and salted foods. They are still a spring treat and a health boost today. Their juicy crispness is the outward sign of the vitamins, fiber, hydrating gels, anti-oxidants, and myriad other compounds that make us feel better. 

All of these plants need to grow quickly before heat sets in, so they need adequate moisture and fertility. However, they also need enough warmth to fuel growth, and good drainage. Oak trees leaf out when the soil and air temperatures are right for peas and greens, so watch the trees in addition to the calendar.

Peas, spinach, and lettuce enjoy a less acid soil(pH 6.5 to 7.) Traditional practice has been to dig the bed over and incorporate manure, compost,or other sources of organic matter, along with some wood ash or lime. No-dig methods instead use a layer of compost on top of the soil, into which the seeds or transplants are planted. (If the soil is very acid, ash or limestone can be spread as well.) If soil is unseasonably soggy, and too wet to dig or to plant into, I suggest either making your first plantings in containers, or dumping compost/potting mix, on top of the ground and planting into that.

The fastest-growing salad of all is a little California native called Miner's Lettuce. It grows wild in my garden under a big black walnut tree. It's rare to find an edible plant that is both shade-tolerant and tolerant of the poisons secreted into the soil by walnut trees. Amazingly, it has a very mild flavor and juicy texture that has made it a favorite of chefs. It is always my first harvest of the year.

Spinach loves cool weather and and needs quite a bit of moisture to start. Indeed, if your soil is dry, I suggest soaking the seeds for an hour or two. It should be planted now for a spring crop, and again in the fall, as it is adapted not only to cool weather, but to short days. The longer days of summer will make it bolt and taste strong.

Lettuce is the simplest of all to plant and use. A fast-growing, cold-tolerant variety like Emerald Fan, Bronze Arrow, or Hungarian Pink Winter gives you salads very quickly, with the tender texture that is the hallmark of spring. Like most greens, it needs to have space to develop without check. If you will not be able or willing to get down and thin your lettuce, consider transplants. It's easier to thin little pots or trays at table height, and they can go into the ground with room to grow.

Peas are the only one of the bunch that takes two months to crop instead of one. But the new practice of harvesting pea shoots means that even peas can be giving you a harvest quickly. Whether for shoots or pods, peas are easy but not terribly vigorous, so it's good to know their quirks. In cool spring weather, they should be planted more shallowly than other legumes, about 1/2 inch deep. (Late summer plantings should be deeper to take advantage of moisture further down.) They can be transplanted with care when very young, if conditions outside are too wet, windy, cold, or unready, And they need support.

Peas are climbing vines, and don't do well sprawling on the ground. Even very short "bush" varieties are vines, and will not stand up on their own. Short varieties can do well in tomato cages, while taller sorts need a trellis or fence. You should view the heights in seed listings as possibilities, not facts. Cooler weather means the vines will keep growing, while hot or very cold weather will stunt them. Last year's cool spring meant that my Cascadias, normally 4' tall, grew to 8 feet.

Further, they climb in a special way, which needs the right support. Beans, morning glories, and some other vines grow by twining; they'll go round and round a pole in a spiral. Peas will not. Vertical supports are almost useless to them--they need a ladder. They make hand-like twigs called tendrils that grab onto supports as they go. For peas, you need to provide support with horizontal wires, woven branches, bushy twigs, or other horizontal or diagonal handholds a foot or less apart. Pig wire or concrete reinforcing wire works well. Posts with sisal or hemp twine are great; you can cut the twine and compost the entire mass, twine and all.

The turnip/mustard tribe, and has flavors that range from mild to fiery. I like Mizuna and Mizpoona Salad Select for early salads. The fiery mustards like Green Wave, and Dragon Tongue are tamed with cooking, gaining rich complex flavors that are traditional complements to cheese or pork. Carol Deppe once made a quick, dense planting of Green Wave Mustard in a layer of compost spread on her concrete driveway. The planting was cut & processed all at once for freezing. (Detailed in The Tao of Vegetable Gardening.) It would not be an option for long-term or repeated harvest, and needs cool, damp weather. But it put the compost to work until she was able to use it in the garden, and gave a huge crop that stocked the freezer. It shows that given moisture and fertility, these fast growers can make a lot of food in a small amount of time and space.
See the possibilities here.

It's heartbreaking to see people throw away or burn their best source of nutrients and fertility in the name of tidiness.
If you have leaves, lucky you.
If you can get your neighbor's leaves, do it.

How to use them? If they fall on perennial beds, bulbs, shrubs orchards, or beneath trees, you don't have to do anything except feel smug about the fertility they are adding.

If they are on grass or pavement or other places where they are not convenient, rake them up and put them

• as a mulch on vegetable or perennial beds
• in the compost
• in their own pile to make leaf mold and potting soil
• through the shredder if you have one so they will rot down faster

Leaves add all-important carbon to the soil, but have enough nitrogen so that they don't cause nitrogen loss when used in the garden. They are full of minerals the tree brings up from deep layers of the soil. They host beneficial fungal networks and mycelium. They make the best potting compost for starting seeds because they contain gibberellic acid, which spurs germination.

Traditional English gardeners kept leaves in their own compost area, and used the crumbly dark  humus from under the pile for seed starting mix. You can mix 3 parts leaf mold with 2 parts garden soil and one part coarse sand, perlite, vermiculite, rice hulls, or other  drainage-promoting ingredient.

Want to make a new vegetable bed out of lawn or a weedy area? I do this:
1)Mark out your new bed. Find and wet some pieces of cardboard (any cardboard box is good, as long as it is not shiny and doesn't have colored inks--brown cardboard and black ink are fine.) Remove the plastic tape, if any. Overlap the edges and any holes, so weeds can't grow through. Let the cardboard extend a foot outside the edge of the future bed, to prevent weeds from coming in.
2)Pile on leaves, straw, grass clippings, and other garden "waste"
3) Keep moist and protected from wind. A tarp or sheet can be used if necessary. Or another layer of cardboard and a rock.
4) uncover in spring and plant squash, tomatoes, or potatoes. None of those object to a few lumps and leaves. Keep mulched all season with more leaves, straw, etc.
5) By the next year, you have good garden soil and can plant anything.

Leaves to avoid
Most deciduous tree leaves are great for your garden. Pine and especially spruce needles are not so good for vegetables and should be left under their mother tree or used on forest plants that can deal with the oils in them. I am not so worried about acidity, but spruce and cedar do have natural herbicides to prevent the germination of other plants, so leave them in place where they will prevent weeds.

Oak, elm, cottonwood, fruit trees, maple, and other broadleaf trees are all good. Avoid black walnut and eucalyptus. They have poisons in that not only prevent germination, but can kill adult plants of sensitive species.

If you, like me, have a black walnut, you can find lists online of common landscape plants sensitive to juglone, the chemical that walnuts produce. Under my black walnut, a few adapted plants thrive--grass, miner's lettuce, currants, crampbark, filberts, & elder. Vegetables that tolerate juglone include corn, squash, beans, peas, carrots, parsnips, and onions. (NOT brassicas, spinach, chard, or tomatoes.) Since the roots exude juglone as well as the leaves and nuts, don't site sensitive plants near a walnut. Half my garden is in the "walnut zone" and I grow only tolerant plants in that part.

If you rake up walnut leaves, they can still be composted and make fertile soil, but if there are a lot of them, keep them in their own pile. You can use it on the many plants that don't have sensitivity.

Another great tree-based resource is ramial wood chip. More on that in another post.

(The photo at the top is looking toward our garden from the river. Boats are drawn up for the winter. For scale, the greenhouse in the photo is 15 feet tall. The giant oaks are matriarchs that nourish all forms of life here.)

What is a farm? What is a garden? The European settlers on this and other continents thought they knew, and so missed out on learning techniques we are just now rediscovering. I invite you to discover some of them with me in this space over the next year.

October is a beautiful time of harvest and celebration. Each ear of corn is like a wrapped present, with different glowing colors within. Each squash will be a sweet treat in the depths of winter. A bag of dry beans is heavy with real wealth. As we lay them by safe for the winter, let's offer our thanks to those who did the real work of creating these crops from unpromising weeds, too small or bitter to be worthwhile food.  With a digging stick, an observant eye, and a sharp mind, they created our crops. Happy Indigenous Peoples Day, 2022.