| From In the Garden |
| From In the Garden |
Frozen broccoli anyone? This is what I have growing in my vegetable garden at the moment that is edible (thaw first please)! Tennessee and much of the eastern half of the country has been in a deep freeze. For me the cold is one thing but the extremely brutal wind and wind chill factor has seriously chased me into my warm house. Baby it's cold out here! Nonetheless broccoli does okay in the cold and providing we get a few warm ups I fully expect these plants to bounce back like they did after the last big chill we had early last week. I may be a bit optimistic though and might just pick my heads of broccoli waiting for me in the garden. I love fresh picked broccoli! How about you?
The really good thing about planting broccoli in the fall is that you can be assured that when the heads begin to ripen there will not be any worms present to dine on your fresh broccoli-it's too cold for flying moths and their larva so dig in! I do think I'll plant my broccoli starts in mid to late August next year though so they have more time to fill out prior to the deep cold. In the years I've lived in my home it seems December always gets a few deep freezes so I should know to come to expect it. Note to self-plant earlier and don't put it off! Soon enough I'll be removing these plants but for now they aren't hurting anything and are producing. Once the plants come out I'm going to fill in this circular round bed with four blueberry plants. We'll talk about them in a later post.
The other vegetables growing in the garden right now are: onions, garlic, and some lettuce. I did sow seeds of peas, turnips, kale, and spinach. While the peas grew well they never produced and are now buried under the snow. I'll replant seeds in February. The turnips, kale, and spinach might still be growing but I won't know until things warm up here a bit. I probably should've taken more care to protect all crops with the coldframe but I just never got around to arranging things in the vegetable garden this winter. Sigh. There's always next winter.
The greenhouse has some lettuce growing in a flat on a shelf but the lettuce might be called micro because it is SO small and hardly worth harvesting at this point. Hopefully it will grow a bit more and I can start picking some fresh lettuce. We so enjoyed our fresh lettuce from the garden this past spring that even if this lettuce does not grow more I'll plant it out in the garden in February where it will grow well.
That's it for the vegetable garden this month. December and January are normally when my vegetable garden takes a rest and there is not much going on in it. All beds have been prepared for the spring garden and I can relax for a while before things begin to wake up....
in the garden....
Words and Photos Property of In the Garden Blog Team, In the Garden