A little green for the salad bowl

After a long winter, you can long to be able to pick fresh greens for the salad bowl, and that is exactly what this bed should contribute to.

The original plan was to sow spinach directly in the covered bed a month ago, which can often be done under normal conditions. However, the Siberian cold of March got in the way of sowing in the kitchen garden, and now it is too late if it is to be possible to harvest spinach in the bed before peas are to be sown on site in just over a month's time.

Luckily I have had a backup in the form of pre-cultivated spinach in a plug box. The spinach was sown in the window sill in mid-February and was moved to the greenhouse as soon as the worst of the frost was over. Now put the small plants with approx. 15 cm distance in 3 of the bed's rows, and at the same time an early greenhouse salad is planted in the last 2 rows.

The salad was sown in early February and has been standing quite cold ever since so as not to grow out of the plug box. In this way, by pre-cultivating things, you can give the plants an advantage of 1-2 months compared to sowing directly. This makes it possible to later plant something new on the same area, and thus harvest 2 (and maybe 3) times on the same piece of land.

In the bed here, spinach and lettuce, as mentioned later, will be replaced by peas and probably also beets - and when these have been harvested, there may be room for another crop for harvest in late autumn. What it may be, I have not planned yet :-)

Written by Peter Norris, April 6, 2018