Garden Salad Tonight
We love our fresh garden salads and aim to have fresh lettuce just as early in the season as possible. This cold frame full of the leafy greens will keep us in salads for several weeks as we pick just the largest outside leaves from each plant. That way they keep growing and providing us with tasty greens.
Natalie started the seeds for this spring crop back in mid-February in the house, keeping the baby lettuce plants under a grow light until they were big enough to set out in March. There’s no point in planting earlier than that as there’s not enough daylight to support vigorous plant growth until then at our nearly 49° N latitude.
We’ll keep starting new crops of lettuce throughout the growing season so we’ll have fresh greens from now until around Thanksgiving when it finally gets too cold for anything to grow. Of course, this is just one of the vegetables we grow to feed ourselves. We eat food from our garden nearly every week of the year, with fresh vegetables throughout the warm months and frozen, canned, or dried ones sustaining us through much of the winter. We’re not completely self sufficient in the vegetable department but we come reasonably close.
Growing vegetables isn’t something we just started with the coronavirus “stay at home” order. We’ve been at it for some 40 years and learned from our parents and grandparents.