Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Overwintered vegetables

In normal years, I'd have kale of various sorts, spinach, and collards looking great after overwintering. Not this year. It was a hard winter (for us).

It's a pretty grim outlook in my own vegetable garden areas; the one exception is the protected (by a brick wall) kitchen garden next to the Visitor Center (at the botanical garden where I work). I take partial credit for encouraging a four-season garden there.

There, we have lovely nice lettuces, mustards ready to harvest, but a whole array of cole crops that are rapidly sending up flowering shoots (Tuscan kale and arugula among them) following a stressful winter.

In my home garden, they didn't survive winter frosts, so hooray for the protection of the brick wall.

But I have lettuce, and mesclun mix, and arugula coming up in flats, and in the garden, and the peas are FINALLY emerging. They'll probably be blasted by early summer heat, but we'll see!