Well, it's been a month since my last update so I thought you'd like to know how my winter garden experiment is coming along. You'll recall that everything is growing in a small hoophouse that we built in October.
Last month, we had bitterly cold temperatures that were particularly hard on the veggies I'm growing. In the north bed, I have corn salad (mache), kale and arugula growing and the south bed was planted with red-leaf lettuce, mizuna and tat soi.
The north bed is definitely doing a lot better than the south bed, let me tell you! The kale is doing particularly well, the arugula has bounced back from the cold temperatures, and the corn salad -- which I planted late due to poor germination previously -- is still growing right along.
In the south bed, the lettuce has died back to the roots, which I knew would happen once the temperatures got really cold. Lettuce really isn't a super-hardy crop when it comes to growing during the winter months. It produced well until the cold snap, then it was toast.
The corn salad is still growing! (foreground)
However, I'm expecting it will come back from the roots in late winter, just like it did last year (which was a big surprise, by the way). So I'm just leaving it alone.
The mizuna still has some green shoots coming up from the crowns of most of the plants so I'm not giving up on them yet. The same goes for the tat soi plants, although they do look pretty sad!
Today, I went out to our little hoophouse and tidied up the beds. Some of the kale and arugula leaves had decayed after the cold snap so I thought it'd be a good idea to get rid of the leaves.
But if all goes according to plan, I'm intending to harvest some kale leaves this week and make a kale soup. That will be a nice treat!
