Last Vegetables in the Garden

The nights are growing colder up our neck of the woods and with a few frosty mornings lately I thought that maybe we should head out to the garden and pick some of what is left still growing out there :)

Any bits of lettuce and radishes that were left behind have now gone to seed but we have a row of red cabbage that is flourishing in the wet weather. I think the kids were quite surprised to find that they had grown so big!

Everyone had a turn tearing off the large bug eaten outer leaves and pulling the heads, roots and all out of the soil :) Harvesting is sooo much more fun than weeding! I don't remember seeing so much enthusiasm when it was time to pull chickweed, thistles and other weeds *grin*.

Here's one of our larger ones. It must have been around 8 inches in diameter and quite heavy. As I had my little mini photo shoot with the kids you could see that their arms were getting quite tired from lifting them up *grin*. They're such good sports for their mama LOL.

All that's left now are the leeks. They are doing fabulously despite being completely surround by weeds *grin*. We stopped weeding a while ago. Part laziness, part master plan as the weeds were covering the soil and keeping it much more moist than when the dirt was open to the sun and then it dried out so quickly. Haha, see there is a method to my madness!!

I'm not quite ready to pull them all as there are way to many to just eat so I would have to blanch them for freezing so I think I might mulch them and see if I can prevent them from freezing and be able to pull them fresh from the garden as I need them :) How long do you leave your leeks in the garden?

Hugs,
Rosina

Garden Fever

It has finally warmed up enough here to start planting the garden, hooray!! It's hard to believe that we have only been snow free for 3 weeks but the bitter cold frosty mornings are still hanging on :) My oldest two are really into the garden this year and want to help out with ever aspect which is wonderful. I hope the enthusiasm holds out through the weeding season! LOL.



When we were down island last week I cheated a bit and picked up some veggie starter packs to plant along with our seedlings to give us a bit of an earlier harvest on some of the veggies. The kids picked out cabbage, broccoli, artichokes, lettuce and some sweet peas to grow up the garden fence.



Teamwork, you gotta love it! One to scoop the horse manure into the holes and another to plunk in the plants :)

And what would a day of digging in the dirt be without worms! Thank goodness there was no taste testing. Well there may have been a little dirt munching at one point, but definitely no worms made it into my 3 year olds mouth :) Now we just have to keep the slugs at bay until we can plant our warmer crops after May 24th. The danger of any frost will have passed by then and I am so looking forward to beans.

~ Rosina