"That kale was delicious!" is what was said in my house recently.
I've really outdone myself this year in my veggie beds. As you may know, they've been in a sorry state for a couple of years, and I showed you what they looked like a couple of months ago.
My veggie garden has been sadly neglected for two years (or more?) now. Severely neglected. Completely ignored actually. So it was a big surprise to me recently when I discovered...
Fall is a great time to plant trees, shrubs, and perennials as I'm sure you've heard, but my trip to Greenscape Gardens this past weekend had a specific purpose. I wanted to get some kale into the veggie beds so I could overwinter it -- my most productive and successful edible strategy.
I have a relatively small garden for edibles, needing to fence it to keep out the trio of volunteer pruners that are daily visitors to my yard: deer, rabbits, and woodchucks.
I'm talking about my veggie beds, where I always let crops linger too long. I really should remove things as soon as I'm finished harvesting, but I let them stay, hoping for extended production. In this specific case I'm talking about my kale, which I planted last autumn, overwintered, and was rewarded with a springtime bounty.
I removed the covers from my veggie beds the other day, as I wanted any plants inside them to enjoy the two days of 70ºF weather that was coming. Toward the end of January I planted lettuce seeds on a warmer-than-normal weekend and covered that bed with plastic.
We've had one really cold night in St. Louis so far, when it dipped down to 16ºF (-9ºC) ten days ago. It didn't stay that cold of course, and we even had a record high temperature of 80ºF since that cold night, but cold is coming again.
It's time for the kale to finally go. I overwintered this under hoops and plastic this year, and it rewarded me with so many fantastic early salads this spring.
I noticed this past weekend that although there is still a lot of work to do around the garden, and lots of plants are just barely starting to emerge, certain areas are looking quite good. For instance, the veggie garden.
Of the edible plants that I overwintered this year, kale is king...
If you ask me what my weakest area in the garden is, where I show the least amount of skill, I'd have to say that's the veggie garden. I'm just not too good with edibles for whatever reason. Perhaps some of it is out of my hands as the trees limit the amount of sunlight in my small veggie patch. A good part of it is down to me though, in the form of soil prep, watering, and general diligence.
I've been planning on working on my fall veggie garden for a few weeks now. I started some plants in trays a month or more ago, and they've been ready to bite into some soil for a while -- my other projects have been getting in the way though.
Yesterday morning I attended the first informal gathering at Schlafly Gardenworks in St. Louis. I posted about this garden before: it's where I attended a gardening talk that got me inspired a month ago, and where I got the sacks of coffee grounds to use as fertilizer. There was so much interest at that talk that they decided to start meeting monthly out in the garden, earlier in the year than they would have normally considered.
Barbara and Christine over at The Gardening Blog have started a garden meme showing what edibles have been harvested in the last month: Garden Bloggers Harvest Day!
The day after Christmas, and there is one plant in the miserable failure that was my vegetable garden this year that is still going strong: kale.
My vegetable bed is the only fenced-off part of my yard. It's really a necessity because of the rabbits, woodchucks, deer, and other critters. It's also the place that I store several potted plants over the winter, and is surely one of the most-neglected areas of my yard in the Fall.
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