Sunday, June 27, 2010

Drowning in salad

Don't get me wrong. I love my husband. Dearly. To pieces. But let's just say sometimes (OK, most of the time) he goes a little too far with projects.

Take our garden for instance. Sure it may be a tad more than we really need, but it's doable. And I don't mind spending some time on the weekend preserving things.

If what's been planted is preservable.

And that leads me to today's rant. Salad greens.

A friend gave us a dozen or so beautiful starts of lettuce which we planted. And then, since our garden was ready for seed before we could plant anything of substance, we planted lots of salad greens.

Lots of salad greens.

We had the transplants. Then we planted rows of them, criss-crossing our 10-foot long long, 4-foot wide beds. And we planted them in between things that would grow tall, shading our salad greens from the hot sun that we knew was coming. It would be great, Dan told me.

That was 6 weeks or so ago. This week is when things got crazy. Salad greens were everywhere.

Now I should add that we did also plant DLGs: beets, 3 varieties of kale, 2 of chard, mustard, bok choy, yukina savoy. Unfortunately got to a lot of it first.

Back to SaladGate. So over the week I harvested 3 beautiful heads of greens from the starts Tobi gave us. Yesterday I began thinning. I cleaned over a pound of mixed greens plus some dark leafy ones. Today I harvested mostof the rest of the headed lettuce--8 heads--plus thinned at least 1 pound more salad plus some extra DLGs. I have 3 more heads that need to be harvested before they bolt. And a good amount that can stand to be thinned right now.

I honestly have so much I might sell bags of mesclun mix to folks at work tomorrow.

Anyone in VT need some salad greens? Here's the take from day 2's thinnings:




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