How Does Your Garden Grow?
Salad greens (butter leaf lettuce, romaine lettuce and spinach), cabbage, broccoli, brussel sprouts, and cauliflower.
Strawberries that we planted last year. The leaves remained green throughout the winter. This spring they've already grown to over 1 foot tall, so I put cages around them for support.
Blueberries- 2 different varieties for cross-pollination.
Herb Garden: some starter plants, some transplants, and some seeds in the soil. So far we have sage, rosemary, basil (lots of basil!), thyme, cilantro, stevia, and lavender
This bed has parsley (this bed has more shade than the location of the herb garden, and parsley can't take the heat of full sun), kohlrabi, leeks, and seeds in the soil for beets and turnips.
If you haven't yet tried kohlrabi, give it a whirl! It is a root vegetable and looks like the alien brother of a turnip. The flavor is somewhere between turnip and cauliflower, and it has a thick, fibrous skin that needs to be cut away before cooking or eating.
So far we have two tomato varieties going- but plan to purchase starter plants for more. These are heirloom "Mr. Stripey" (yeah, I mostly bought it for the name) and heirloom Rutgers, and they're about 1 1/2-2 feet tall now.
These are the tops of some wild, monster carrots. I planted seeds about 3 years ago and got almost nothing the first year. By the end of that first season with little to no yield, honestly, I'd forgotten about them. The second year they came back in force! This year they are out of control! Let it go, let it grow.
This is the big weekend haul! An armload of Swiss Chard and a big bowl of salad greens. There is now way we'll be able to eat all of this chard before is spoils. I'm hoping that I can sautee it and freeze some for future soup?
Clever, Crafty Garden Ideas:
In Colorado, we have had an unseasonably warm spring this year. Typically cautious gardeners don't transplant seedlings outside or put seeds in the ground until Mother's Day. This year- in a very uncharacteristically daring move for me- I took a gamble and planted in mid March!!
As a gardener, I have evolved a "let it go, let it grow" philosophy and well, let go of the extreme planner and rule-follower in me and listened to my gut and put some trust in 'ol Mother Nature. She did not disappoint!! Over the weekend- the weekend before a typical Colorado planting season even begins, mind you- I harvested an armload of Swiss Chard and salad greens. We have picked a little here and there over the last few weeks but the garden has been exploding with growth and was in need of a big harvest. And within the next day or so, everything had all but grown back. We will eat well this year!
If you haven't yet tried kohlrabi, give it a whirl! It is a root vegetable and looks like the alien brother of a turnip. The flavor is somewhere between turnip and cauliflower, and it has a thick, fibrous skin that needs to be cut away before cooking or eating.
Clever, Crafty Garden Ideas:
Image: http://www.galtsgulchorbust.com/2012/03/outside-box-spring-gardening-ideas.html
