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| Overwintering lettuce and chard |
This is the time for salads. Many salad fixings are ready to be harvested from the garden. We are having an extended spring for the second year in a row. While it is cooler and rainier than most recent years, it is great weather for growing sweet greens.
The first to be ready to eat in the spring are all the cold hardy veggies that survived the winter and the edible perennials that are first up in the spring. In our garden, the overwintering veggies were carrots, celery, parsley, lettuce, sprouting broccoli, chard, cultivated dandelions, chickweed, Egyptian walking onions, chives, mustard greens, Chinese cabbage, kale and arugula. Edible perennials that are ready to add to salads are sorrel, redbud blooms, and dandelion flowers.
Now is the time to give the greens a watering with liquid fertilizer like fish emulsion which is high in nitrogen to get them the food they need for filling out. Greens love nitrogen and cooler weather makes it less available in the soil. A liquid fertilizer is an easy way to get usable nitrogen to the plant.
With the renovations happening at our house, I have not started lettuce indoors this year. I had a few that overwintered and a few volunteers. The rest I have purchased as transplants over the last month. Transplants are instant garden!
I just got some mini Red Romaine that I'll be transplanting them outdoors today. I have been harvesting leaves for salads over the last couple of weeks. A trick to having continuous harvests is to pick just the larger leaves around the outside of the plant so it continues to grow. The other way is to do succession planting, sowing seeds about every 3 weeks to keep new plants in prime production.
Since all the transplants I have gotten were in outdoor racks, they are fully hardened off for spring conditions. If you are starting them indoors from seed, be sure to harden off before putting directly into the garden or pot. I will first put them in a pot on the covered patio. After they have a chance to grow a little bigger and adjust to the outdoor temperatures and sun, I transplant them out into their permanent spot.
I have started some lettuce seed in outdoor pots. They are ones that have done very well in my summer garden last year. I will start Red Malabar spinach, amaranth, New Zealand spinach and orach that thrive in the hot and humid weather and are tasty in salads when it warms up a bit more. With as cool as this spring has been, it will likely be the first of May before I start these summer lovers.
If you want instant homegrown salads, visit your local nurseries and big box stores for ready to plant lettuce, spinach, chard, and other greens. You get an unending harvest by taking only the leaves on the outside of the plants, leaving the inner leaves growing. The plants I saw yesterday are large enough to begin harvesting as soon as you bring them home!
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