First Harvest

I was going to post this last week, but my phone crashed and I lost all my pictures. Of course, that included all the pictures I took for this post (along with several other posts). I had to wait for my next harvest to retake them. Not the end of the world, but it put me behind schedule.

Anyway, last week I had my first substantial harvest. It made for a yummy salad, and I've been eating salads almost every day since!

First salad harvest (ehem, second)

I already mentioned my first official harvest of radishes in my latest greenhouse update. Well, now I have added lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, chives and garlic chives to the harvest. A great salad mix, heck I even threw in some dandelion leaves and greens from the radishes. Yep, I'm trying as much new stuff as I can this year.

Radishes

The radishes continue to produce like crazy, in fact, they are almost gone already.

Here is a big bunch of radishes that I harvested yesterday. 

I think I might try to get one more crop in this spring.

I've never done a second spring crop before, how exciting!

Spinach and lettuce bowls

Lettuce and spinach are the main ingredients in all my salads, and they look beautiful in the garden too.

I love that they don't need much room to grow so I can tuck them anywhere.

They don't mind being a bit crowded or mixed in with other vegetables, and they do great in containers.

All the extra lettuce and spinach seedlings went into these bowl planters for a nice decorative touch.

Speaking of decorative touch, swiss chard 'Ruby Red' makes a bold statement in the vegetable garden.

Swiss chard 'Ruby Red'

I grew swiss chard last year, but just a green variety. It didn't grow very well, and blended in so I completely forgot about it.

I planted 'Ruby Red' this year to add extra color to the garden, plus I wanted to taste them.

I've never had swiss chard before.

The flavor is similar to leaf lettuce, but a bit stronger. I love it and will definitely grow it again.

That's it for the harvest pictures. Now I would like to take a moment to acknowledge my salad spinner. Funny story...  When I put this on the wedding registry back when we got married, my husband (well, fiance) rolled his eyes and said "Will you really ever use that?" (this is a question we asked each other often while building our registry :-).

I was skeptical too, but decided to keep it on the list. Well, I'm glad I did because I use it constantly during harvest time. It makes cleaning and drying greens and other vegetables a snap! I highly recommend you get one if you don't have one.

Salad spinner

Now it's your turn, what have you been harvesting?

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