Endless Salads

It has been a good spring so far; this year, I discovered mustard greens. They grow well in winter, make huge leaves, which add spice to salads, and can also be cooked like spinach. I prefer them raw. However, mustard greens is not all I have been eating. The rocket, as usual, is doing well from its self-sowings, and crops of parsley and cilantro are also doing well. All of these seed themselves and look after themselves. The lettuce, of course also did well, but this I tend to block sow in pots, transplant into small posts, and then put into the soil when bigger. I also have a red lacy mustard that looks nice in a salad, and when you put all of the above together, I have been eating a big green salad every day for 2-3 months now.

In this bed, you can see curly kale (blue-green), dill (feathery), mustard greens (light green, rounded leaves), and other salad greens (endive salady thing on the bottom left, black-seeded Simpson lettuce on the top right).  I like to mix the plants like this, because they each take different nutrients from the soil; however, I'm aware that this is not the best thing to do from a crop-rotation perspective.

For those who think that global warming is a myth, you can see I'm harvesting bell peppers in Feb-March. Admittedly, the fruit are not growing much in the winter, but the plants are overwintering nicely outside. I have now re-potted these plants into larger pots, and I'm hoping that as the weather warms up, these plants will resume growth and make even larger plants this year.