Last fall when I was planting the cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli, kohl rabi, chard, and spinach I didn't think as much about what it would look like in the winter as I am now. The gardens look beautiful and are feeding us most days with really healthy greens. We have found we like the bok choi so much that I reseeded for spring. Chard has been a bane. It grows so well but it is an acquired taste until this week when I steamed it in tomato juice instead of water or oil. Also found a great greens recipe with beer and molasses in it. WOW! Now we cannot get enough. I am impatiently waiting to harvest the first broccoli and kohl rabi.
Broccoli is really coming on--2 last week and several not far behind. The cauliflower are heading too deep in their leaves while close by the kohl rabi are beginning to make their bulbs. None of them is following the schedule on the seed packets but the produce will be welcome as it comes. We will probably get far more than I planned on from the looks of it now.
The green house has been a real surprise to us. We really just wanted to salvage and protect the plants that were not done bearing but were frost tender--tomatoes and peppers with an eggplant thrown in. The heat and humidity has produced a new crop of peppers and has resulted in tasty vine ripened tomatoes that are better than I had last summer. I have draped the lettuce bed with plastic sheeting in a kind of cold frame arrangement to try and even out temperature and moisture and am being rewarded with bags of leaves every week now. Better get some more seedlings going to put in next month as these play out.
