Salad Harvest

Now we are in full salad harvest mode.  Leaf lettuce, spinach salads everyday with radishes thrown in once in a while.  The lettuce has been loving the last week of 60 degree temps and drizzly days.  The taste is so much better than the previous week when it was in the 80s and 90s.  Although we found that by mixing the bitter lettuce leaves with the creamy, mild spinach, that they can balance each other out quite well.  Much better than throwing away baskets of lettuce because it is too bitter.

We seem to get about 4 weeks of quality lettuce from our plants before the seed stalk really takes over.   Once that happens, I pull the plants, add some compost topping and plant some new seeds, except for the heat of summer.

The onions, which I didn't think would make it through all the hard freezes, are the biggest I've ever seen grown in a square foot garden and are bigger than the commercial vegetable farmer's down the road.  His are the same size as my second crop, which I planted in mid-April.  I'm hoping to get some nice baseball sized onions, possibly a few bigger.  The plants are higher than my hip with a couple reaching for my chest.

The beans that made it through the frost really taking off with the healthiest plants being calf high already.  The 7 cucumbers look really good so far.  Hopefully they won't die off in July like the preceding years.  Zucchini and squash are huge already.