May 8th and our greens are thriving. We need to start harvesting them and planting something else in this space. Unfortunately, we will not be using this garden bed to grow any warm season crops this year. We will be moving our warm season plants to a different location and turning this bed back into lawn. For a how-to on turning a garden space into a lawn, we will cover that in another post later this week.
Today we are harvesting the spinach that has overwintered. The picture above on the right shows a spinach plant starting to form a flower spike. When salad greens flower they don’t taste very good so when this starts to happen it’s time to cut them down. Pull up each plant by the roots and cut all the leaves off into a bowl. Roots can go into the compost.
Meanwhile, we are starting to take down our PVC hoops and benches as we harvest the hydroponic lettuce and kale we have been growing with the Gardner Cultivation Blend fertilizer. This hoop structure has produced over a dozen heads of lettuce and just as many bunches of kale over the last several weeks and will produce several dozen more as we remove it. When we are finished it will leave only a healthy, green lawn in this spot.