April 20, 2015
Harvests
My neighbor grows turnip salad in the winter. Once it bolts in the spring, before he tills them in, my kids eat the blossoms when we go on walks. The kids asked if we could try the turnips. I’ve never tasted them or grew them but since my neighbors didn’t want them, we dug them up and made turnip fritters. They liked them 🙂 I’m not sure if they like them enough for us to plant them this fall but we’ll see.
My neighbor also grows kale for me over the winter (you can never have enough!). We don’t love the taste of overwintered kale for salads but I can use it for juicing. No need for it to go to waste!
We only have enough kale blossoms to snack on; not enough for a meal, but we are enjoying them!
Lastly, we were able to harvest our first salad!!! This spinach was planted first of March.
We were pretty excited to have our first salad of the season 🙂 It ended up being a whole month before our first harvest last year.
Other Happenings
Some potatoes are starting to come through!
We had fire ants in our strawberry bed. I tried stirring the ants. That did not work. I tried DE. Nope. Finally, I saw an article about boiling water. BINGO! I did this for two days (with the mulch, it was difficult to see where the hill opening was. The ants moved 5 feet away to the spinach bed. I poured boiling water on them there and they moved about 30 feet away. More boiling water and…I haven’t seen them yet. We’ll just wait and see. I love the fact that the solution (as temporary as it is) is so easy, free, and works so well!
Speaking of the strawberry bed…
We have blossoms! (and pollen. Lots and Lots of pollen.)
Our princess tulips are up. Now the only bulbing flower we’re waiting on is our Frittaria Tulips!
Planting
I planted celery (from the store, grown on the kitchen table), spinach, lettuce, peas (last planting), carrots, and beets this weekend.
This week I will tackle all of the warm-season seeds: snaps, corn, pole beans, summer and winter squash, sunflowers, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, marigolds, melons, flowers, ground cherries…seriously – if anyone wants to come help, my gratitude knows no bounds! (and help can be in the form of playing with the kids — doesn’t have to be the planting :D)
Oh! And I have to bury my sweet potatoes so I can start growing slips! Ah! So.Much.To.Do! Are you harvesting anything? Head over to Daphne’s Dandelions to see what others are harvesting this time of year.
Gardening Without... 
Isn’t the first harvest just wonderful. Never plentiful, but wonderful none the less. And I was wondering what the white spots were on your plants. We sometimes get pollen like that but usually not. It rains enough here that it washes out of the air fairly regularly. But when I was growing up in Colorado the pollen coated everything. It was pretty amazing with everything glazed yellow.
POLLEN! It was horrible for about 4-5 days before we got a good rain.
Congrats on finding a new food they like. I know it can be hard to convince mine to eat different foods sometimes. 😉 Congrats on the chicks, too!
thx!
Your turnip reminded me of my grandmother. She said during the depression of the 1930s, she and her family spent an entire summer eating nothing but turnips because that’s all they had (boiled, mashed, baked, etc.)
I wish I could plant like you are now. We keep getting such crazy weather that I’m a few weeks behind compared to a normal year. I have tomato seedling that are trying to take over the house they are getting so big, but I may have to wait one more week for the cold snap and storms to get by.