Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Time to spread this link again: Rhode Island Planting Calendar for Fruits and Vegetables by URI Master Gardeners.

This is a 2002 version. I think we're warmer sooner now.

But we're just too wet. My spinach and strawberries are the lovage plant I rescued are loving it.

Lovage is like strongly-flavored celery, but tougher. It's great to mince fine in egg or tuna salad with along with onion. Only the youngest sprouts are a raw-celery substitute, as the get woody as the grow, and are then best braised or in soups. The stalks are round and hollow, and sometimes serve as straws in Bloody Marys.

One plant is enough. This is a true perennial that's taken to the sunnier side of a deep raised bed of strange bedfellows: Giant allium, garlic, lilies, lovage, the last gasps of hyacinth and narcissus, some underwhelmed spinach and lettuce translplants and a rogue raspberry, seeded by a bird, whose runners keep popping up from one end of the bed to the other even after the main plant and visible runners were moved to a sunny spot with others of its kind. Taller seems to work better here, perhaps because height catches a bit more sun -- a neighbor's wooden fence and the angle of the sun are in a critical balance there.

Perhaps I should grow corn and beans and squash, the Three Sisters.

Creating a Three Sisters Garden at kidsgardening has pictures, and spells out the instructions.

Blogger Tom Paine's Ghost enlarges it elegantly for adults.The Three Sisters: Corn Beans and Squash.

The short version comes from NativeTech: Native American Technology and Art: Planting a Three Sisters Garden...

According to the URI planting guide, you can plant corn seeds now, beans starting May 15, squash starting June 1. This works, as you want the corn taller than the beans that will use it for a beanpole, and both need to be well up before the squash starts covering low-lying neighbors.