Our winter was freezing, sometimes to 18 degrees at night. It would of course warm up to 50 to 60 degrees or higher when the sun rose from it's Arizona slumber. As we await the day's warmth to force our sweater layer off to the tank top, we worry over our greens, stiff, bright green and sparkling with ice.
Here we are in mid February, looking forward to this year's garden. Spring is approaching, and also time to prep for this year's crop. So for the winter experiment, how did we do? The survivors: beets, kale, collards, and surprisingly coriander. Swiss chard, romaine, and parsley are close winners as well, a little smaller, but still a lovely deep green, or red with the chard.
After a few days of constant observance and drumming up the will to deal with the weeds (they are wild mustard greens, also a mean salad of bitter greens) that are also plentiful, wanting to take over and happy little campers.
We've noticed that our winter survivors have started to grow again, not just survive. To our surprise, almost overnight, the coriander almost doubled in growth. The romaine has increased in size... the collards and kale are both showing new growth.
Our beets looked formidable once we extracted them from those mustard weeds, however over the winter, they got a bit woody because like the others in the garden, began to grow again. In the end we got a good crop of beet greens out of this discovery.
I love this time of year. Spring always gives me excitement to plant my new seeds all too early, but with this new growth I just can't help myself... I'll keep you posted!
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