February Garden

We continue to get a nice amount of fresh food to eat from our garden in February. Last week we had enough lettuce, spinach and arugula to have a couple of nice salads for lunch. Those greens all came from the greenhouse and cold frames.

And I picked about a pound of kale from the main garden. It has held up amazingly well this year, and is even starting to put on some new growth. I made kale chips with some of it, put a few leaves in a green smoothie, and braised the rest as a side dish last night. The variety here is mostly the curly Starbor.

Here’s an update on how the greens in the cold frames are doing. Cold frame #1 has lettuce, mizuna and spinach planted in it.

The Sea of Red, Ruby and Radichetta lettuces are doing pretty well. With mild weather forecast this coming week, and lengthening days, they should start growing again very soon.

The Winter Density lettuce is hanging on, but not as healthy looking as the other lettuces. You’d think with “winter” in its name it would be doing a little better! It’s alive though, and it may very well start growing and surprise me.

Cold frame #2 has more lettuce and spinach plus komatsuna, arugula and tatsoi.

The komatsuna and tatsoi are looking great. They are seemingly unfazed by all the cold weather. I will be growing them every winter. The mizuna plants aren’t faring as well, which is my own fault. Those transplants were a little small when I planted them last December. Next time I need to plant them a bit earlier. The mizuna in the greenhouse is doing fine though. The Spotted Trout lettuce (aka Forellenschluss) looks pretty good too. I believe it has earned a place in the winter garden as well. So has the arugula.

Of course the spinach doesn’t mind the cold at all. I’ve been harvesting enough of it for salads, but it won’t be long before it takes off and there’s enough for cooking.

For next winter, I have some more winter hardy varieties of lettuce and greens that I plan on growing. For the experiment this winter I pretty much used the varieties I had available. So far I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how things have performed. Now I hope to take what I have learned and tweak it and have even more things available to eat for the next winter season.

Another thing I want to do is build more cold frames. In fact, I am planning on getting the materials this week and hopefully I can get at least one built. That will give us even more protected growing space for our cold weather gardening.

That’s a little peek at what’s happening in our gardens in February. I hope you enjoyed the tour, and remember, Spring is right around the corner!