Monday, July 2, 2012

The Salad Garden

The Salad Garden
 Last night we had our first complete salad from the garden, with the exception of a yellow and red sweet pepper!  Hurray...this means the season of healthy eating is underway. Now the hard work begins to pay off.

After harvesting yesterday morning, I realized I had a little work to do in this garden, so spent a few hours weeding and caring for these hard working vegetables.

The salad garden is having it's ups and downs this year. Usually I follow pretty closely a four-year rotation schedule in my vegetable garden.  But this year I decided to make one area a simple salad garden.  It contains snow peas, two kinds of lettuce, spinach, radishes, pac choi, and celery. I also put my basil, parsley, cilantro and dill in this bed.

Snow peas


The snow peas are doing so well this year.  Probably due to the cooler and wetter spring.  My grandsons love them dipped in ranch dressing.  This year we have had several meals with sauteed snow peas with just a tiny sprinkle of sugar to help them carmelize. So very good!




Pac Choi
However, my radishes are woody and inedible. One of my favorite things in a salad.  I planted some more today. 

My big disappointment is the Pac Choi.  We have never grown this vegetable before, but love it in stir fry. We planted the seeds indoors in March and were late getting them in the ground. Even though the weather has been cool and wet, they are beginning to go to seed.  I know I didn't thin them as quickly as I should have.

I read on a garden forum that many people find the plant edible even though it is bolting as long as you eat it before the flowers have actually bloomed, so maybe we will have it tomorrow.

Lettuces
And lastly in the salad garden are the pretty lettuces and spinach. They are doing so well in this bed! There is nothing better than a home grown salad or fresh from the garden lettuce on your sandwich. Yum, Yum.

I think it might work out okay to grow the salad garden as a fifth rotation bed. There may be two years of the same crop, but three years before any crop gets repeated.  More about my rotation at a later date.

Happy salad making!

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