Garden Salad

A salad from my garden! The winter greens are especially nice and crunchy. We've had frost for the past two weeks, but not to grown level.

Mesclun

The mesclun is growing so well! I've gone out several times with a pair of scissors and cut a quarter of the square, enough to make a salad. In less than a week, it has gown back again.

Cabbage Caterpillars

Do you see the little cabbage moth caterpillars on the back of the kale leaves? We started out by picking them off, but we couldn't keep up.

A week later (on Halloween) all we had was skeleton kale!

Then the caterpillars moved on to the turnips to eat and grow fat. We bought some bt, but we haven't used it yet. The caterpillars seem to be only on one side of the garden. I want to get rid of them before the find the red Russian kale on the other side.

First Harvest: Radishes

We harvested half the radishes and ate them for dinner. It was fun to have all different colors. They were nice and spicy. I was surprised at the different sizes. We left some in the ground because they seemed quite small. I planted a second crop a few weeks ago and they're sprouted now. I think I'll pull up the rest of the radishes in this square and plant more lettuce.

Lettuce and Spinach

The lettuce in growing well. Take a look at the previous post and see how much they've grown in just three weeks. I can tell I disturbed the seeds by watering soon after they were planted, because the square is not evenly covered with lettuce plants. I'm looking forward to the day when I can take my scissors and fill the salad bowl.

The spinach is becoming recognizable. I think everything has slowed down some now that the days are getting shorter and the nights are cooler.

Growing Nicely

Can you see the onion sprouts? They're so tiny. They will become red and green scallions.

The mesclun is growing. I can start to see the different kinds of lettuce.

These are the sugar snap peas, the biggest plants in garden so far. They're supposed to grow to vines five feet tall, so I'm going to have come up with some kind of a support pretty soon. I may use an old tomato cage.

We're supposed to have heat wave of 100 degrees tomorrow. I just watered everything. I'll water again in the morning and drape the shade cloth over the cage before I go to work.

Territorial Seeds

I planted some more seeds. I couldn't find collards, turnips or kale here, so I ordered these seeds from Territorial Seeds in Cottage Grove OR (a blast from the past!).

The red Russian kale is my favorite kind of kale, so I'm looking forward to eating it. It's very tender and sweet. I've heard that collard plants get very tall and you can keep picking leaves from them. I hope that kale and collards will be my winter vegetable staples.

I planted these last weekend and the turnips and collards have already sprouted. I get just one collard plant in one square foot, so I hope it does well!