Celebrating Our First Harvest!

What's tiny, red and tastes a bit spicy?

Say hello to our first radish!

Ok, so it's not much, but I am SUPER excited to show off our first vegetable straight out of the hoop house.  Claire was so eager to pick something other than lettuce leaves (she's been munching on them for weeks whenever we would walk up to water) so I gave in and let her pick a radish from the pot.

These are the ones we planted back in December. They grew s-l-o-w-l-y in our unheated greenhouse, but grow they did. The January and February ones are just as far along. Claire described the flavor as being "like spicy pepper, but it was good too [at the start]."

The rule in our house is that you must try food. You may not like it, but give it a shot. Even parents have foods that they don't like (don't you try to sneak any olives onto my plate!), but we should always have a try to see if our tastes have changed. Claire could live on broccoli, kale and garlicky spinach and she loves (gasp!) brussel sprouts. Really, the only things she doesn't enjoy are mushrooms, olives and (lately) raw tomato. And bread...we almost never have sandwiches because she never eats the bread.

Claire has shown me that it is entirely possible to eat PB&J without the bread, it's just very, very messy.

Are you gardening with your little ones this year? 

Greenhouse Gardening in Winter

We used an eye dropper to water at first
so the seedlings wouldn't float away     

We're so lucky to have two large hoop houses at our new house. Right now I'm mainly using them to over-winter some perennials that didn't make it into the ground, but back in December I thought a little experimentation with  growing vegetables in the winter would be fun.

I was unable to find a lot of information geared towards the home gardener about growing vegetables in unheated hoop houses. In fact, most everything I read said plants would continue to grow if established, but that starting seedlings was near impossible. The previous homeowners left us an abundance of styrofoam coolers and I figured if I nested a few of them together and covered them with bubble wrap, we might be able to get some seeds going, even (fingers-crossed) in the winter.

So far, everything we've planted has sprouted! I went with all cool season veggies (carrots, peas, lettuce, radish, chard, beets) and Claire's been gently watering them every other week. Everything is growing, but slowly. The plants sown on December 19 and the plants sown on Jan 15 are about the same size.

Claire made a great observation that ALL the seedlings look alike at this point in their growth. Of course it was phrased more like, "Mooooommmmy, you mixed the seeds up. They're all the same <pout pout pout>."