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.

Moles.

All winter long, I was wondering what those molehills were; not being native to this area, but to Europe, I would have said they were due to moles if I lived in the UK, but here? They could be anything for all I knew. Gophers, perhaps. Giant termites. Anything.

Anyway, the mystery was solved today, when I caught one accidentally while filling a pot with home-made compost. One of the chunks squeaked and quickly re-buried itself.

So here it is, in all its glory; an Almaden Valley mole.

Moles eat worms, grubs, insects and so on, mainly, so they won't be attacking my plants directly. They will, however, cut down on some pests - grubs, slugs, snails - and till and aerate the soil. So this little new acquaintance went back into the compost pile.

What you see of the tail in the picture is all there is; about an inch. Spade-shaped front paws, big nose. Lovely fur.