garden of greens

It's the end of May and our greens garden is flourishing! Last year, this was our only planting area and we had quite a few things here that didn't really have enough time to take off, or receive enough sun once they did. This year, we got ourselves in gear and started early with seed sprouting in the basement in February. This part of the yard gets a bit too much shade for veggies like tomatoes, eggplant, & peppers. It will work, but it will definitely take more time for everything to ripen. Since we have a new raised bed area in a very sunny spot this year, we decided to dedicate this space primarily to greens & early spring veggies and have most of the fruiting plants in the raised beds. 

By late March/early April our seedlings were hardened off & we were filling the space with brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce mixes, several kale, chard, & spinach varieties, onions, purslane, beets, herbs, and peas. The planning is finally paying off and my dream of having enough kale in the garden to make kale chips every day is finally being realized! :)

The kale in the back had overwintered & is bolting now, but the flowers are edible and very tasty!

Another lesson learned - we added straw between the rows, which we loved! Until we realized we should probably only add straw that hasn't gone to seed - as you can see, we grew a lot of grass. :) We've just replaced this with a weed tarp & some very nice cedar mulch.

Onions planted in late April.

Delicious summer lettuce mix. We've been able to harvest all our salads for a couple of weeks now & hope to keep it going through at least mid-summer.

Parsley & Purslane (p.s. if you haven't had it, purslane is delicious & has more omega 3 than any other leafy plant! we could never find it anywhere, so we decided to grow it ourselves)

Cauliflower is coming along well.

Spinach, lettuces mixes, and kale harvested earlier this week.