This week’s harvest added some baby spinach to the mix. I made a wilted spinach salad with some hot balsamic vinaigrette, orange sections and walnuts.
baby spinach harvest
The spinach was harvested when I did the final thinning from one of the greenhouse beds. I have more thinning to do, so we’ll have that to eat next week perhaps. When I thin spinach the first time I always leave it a bit close together so I can eat some later when I do the final thinning.
unthinned spinach
I also harvested more Golden Yellow pak choi, tatsoi, and various lettuces. Total haul for the week was 2.11 lbs. I have created a table with this year’s harvest totals and put it on its own page. That should make tracking a bit easier.
dark green tatsoi
This weekend I took advantage of the sunshine and warmer temps and worked on the cold frame beds. I harvested all the lettuce that was left, and replanted. The larger cold frame now has lettuce and spinach, while the smaller one is planted with curly endive and radicchio.
cold frame with lettuce seedlings and spinach
cold frame with endive and radicchio
The harvests are starting to pick up here, and it won’t be long before the first asparagus is ready. That will be a true sign of spring!
I so love the look of tatsoi. It is such a beautiful plant. Your spinach looks great too.
I always enjoy visiting your vegetable gardens. I do love baby spinach salads and your post is making me hungry :^)
Everything looks really good. The salad sounds delicious. Spinach is one of the few greens that I don’t grow, I’m just never happy with the way it grows and I get lots of yucky leaf miners. Maybe I’ll have to try again under some row cover to deter the pests.
Nice spinach and salad, I like your cold frames, they look so nice and sturdy.
I’ve never grown tatsoi before, I think I have some seeds somewhere, I should dig into my seed boxes and plan more seeds the next few days.
I like tatsoi because it grows so fast, plus it makes lots of leaves. I start it inside so I have transplants ready to replant when I harvest.
Ah green, one of the great things about sunlight. I’ve been seeing a lot spinach on the blogs, must be that time of year! Wow, asparagus… sounds lovely as does your salad.
Lovely greens!!!!!!!!!!!! Now you’re making wish that I had started some of mine earlier. I’m feeling like I haven’t taken advantage of my plastic hoops like I should have. Everything looks great!
That spinach looks very nice! And I like how you have two thinnings – that’s good idea.
I was planning on sowing some spinach, but winter is so long this year, we are just having snow fall. That is very unusual for this time of year…
Forgot to mention that your separate page in harvests in good idea, I just might copy it..
Hi villager! I left a comment here earlier but I don’t know where it went… 🙂
Lovely spinach and I will remember that method of thinning twice. Did you ever try to just transplant those spinach thinnings?
If you sow the seeds far enough apart, you can skip the first thinning. I usually oversow and wind up with too many to start with. I got the idea of eating the thinnings from James Crockett on the Victory Garden series, years ago. I’ve never tried transplanting spinach. I’ve heard of mixed results with others doing it.
How do you wilt your spinach? I always end up with it half-raw, half-cooked…
Sometime mine winds up that way too! This time I heated the dressing to boiling, then poured it over the bowl of spinach and tossed like crazy. That seemed to work. I guess it depends on how wilted you want the spinach to be, plus maybe how firm/tender the spinach is. Many is the time we eat our mistakes!
Today I tried wilting my spinach in the microwave – about 15 seconds at a time on medium heat, gently tossing it between zappings. I think I zapped mine three times. And it came out perfectly wilted.