Salad Days

Spring is a wonderful time on many levels. New hope after a long gray winter. New flowers to warm the heart. New green leaves that seem to appear on the trees overnight. And these cool days really are the salad days of gardening because the bugs and beasties have yet to really wake up and start munching. And it's in this cool weather that salad greens are at their best: baby spinach, heirloom lettuces, mache, arugula grow nearly care-free. If you're a salad-lover like I am don't miss your spring opportunity to grow some of these for yourself. I sowed these seeds in this bed about a month ago, but you should still have time to grow a few salads before the summer heat really moves in. Then you just cut as much as you want for your salad--these plants just keep growing! And you won't believe how much better your own home-grown salad is compared to what you get in those expensive bags in the supermarket. Just make sure your soil is nicely prepared, then just follow the instructions on your seed packets. For my lettuce patch I sowed Wildfire Lettuce Mix which is as pretty as it is tasty. If you like a bit of peppery bite in your salad add in some arugula.

In the cool spring weather the baby arugula leaves are really quite mild. I also tried out two types of spinach this spring, Emu and Red Cardinal. Both have provided me with lots of baby spinach leaves to mix into my salad bowl. Be creative--there are endless varieties of leaves you can grow for your own salad bowl!

Early Spring Harvest

The peas are officially in the ground, just-in-time for those forsythia blooms! And I've planted seeds for lettuce, spinach, carrots, parsnips, and beets. There are a few brave little shoots coming up, but they're still tiny. But we still managed to have an early spring harvest of parsnips, salsify, leeks, spinach and mache. How, you might ask? They're actually from last season and they over-wintered in the garden. Root crops like parsnips and salsify are actually biennials. As the weather cools in the fall these plants store their energy in the form of sugar in that big root that we normally eat. These survive in the ground over the winter and when the soil warms up again they begin to sprout new greens and grow, and eventually produce a flower and seeds. If you harvest them as soon as the soil is warm enough to dig you'll find that your parsnips are at their sweetest. Leave them to grow more and those stored sugars wind up fueling the new growth, so nab them when the new leaves just start to show! As for spinach and mache, these greens are very cold-hardy. As long as they have some growth before the true winter comes they survive, and in spring they're raring to go before any new seeds are even germinating.

I wish I could attribute this early harvest to some garden planning genius on my part. In reality I HAD planned on having the parsnips and leeks over the winter, but stupidly forgot that if the ground is FROZEN, you can't dig them out! As for the spinach and mache, I'd hoped to be able to sneak a few leaves during the winter since I'd covered them with fabric for a bit of protection. That really didn't work because for most of the winter the plants were still too small to bother with. And then they got buried under our 2-foot snow fall, and there they stayed! Luckily I don't have to rely on my garden planning for winter survival! But it is nice when you can still reap something of value despite your own poor planning. And guess what? Leaving a few hardy vegetables in the ground over the winter to provide an early spring feast is going to be part of my garden plan from now on!