What we're harvesting in the mid April edible garden

Potted salad greens

Sunday, April 13, 2025

This is the time for salads.  Many salad fixings are ready to be harvested from the garden.  It is inexpensive and instant harvest by buying plants.  You can also start harvesting leaves from seed sown in about 30 days.

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, broccoli, cabbage, chard, cultivated dandelions, chickweed, Egyptian walking onions, chives, mustard greens, arugula.  Edible perennials that are ready to add to salads are sorrel, tarragon, redbud blooms, asparagus, salad burnet, and dandelion flowers.

I gave the greens a watering with liquid fertilizer, fish emulsion, which is high in nitrogen to get them the food they need for filling out last week.  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.

I bought more lettuce and spinach transplants a couple of weeks ago to keep the harvests going through May.  I started harvesting from the new plants last week.  In another month, I'll start sowing seeds in pots outdoors to keep us in salads for the summer. 

I have also started indoors heat tolerant greens Red Malabar spinach, amaranth, New Zealand spinach, orach, sweet mustard and sweet chard varieties thrive in the hot and humid weather and are tasty in salads.

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.