My first garden harvest for this season – Bright Lights Swiss Chard. We steamed the Swiss Chard and had it with butter and salt. Look at the beautiful stems! Red, yellow, pink and white plants came up; the only color that didn’t germinate was orange. Beautiful, delicious, and nutritious!

Looseleaf lettuce and radishes, and a few leaves of Swiss Chard. If you look closely you can see I also harvested some purslane.

The above harvest cleaned and made into a salad.

Now the really awesome thing about Swiss Chard and looseleaf lettuce is you don’t have to pull out the entire plant. Just pick the larger leaves on the outside of the plant and leave the inner, smaller leaves. Within a few days, the inner leaves will become larger, and you can harvest them. This way you can get through the season with only a few plants. Iceberg lettuce has less nutrition, takes longer to grow, and you have to pick the entire head, rather than just take a few outer leaves like the looseleaf lettuces. With Pinetree’s Lettuce Mix, you get over a dozen varieties of looseleaf lettuce, so you get lots of pretty color, as well as texture (flat and curly). Here are pictures of two varieties I was able to identify.

Here is Freckles:
And here is Red Velvet and you can also see some green onions in the lower right corner of the photo.

I’m so happy it’s gardening time again! Although my garden is under attack from gophers, it is still thriving. I wonder if gophers like onions? I think I will fill the first bed, which is unprotected, with onions! I’m going out now to plant in my new bed, which is protected with wire on the bottom and sides to keep the gophers out. Eventually I think I will move to raised beds. My entire garden is already fenced with chicken wire on the top and sides, but we didn’t protect the bottom.

Here is my ever watchful guard kitty, Miss Vicious. She’s in the garden anytime I am, constantly on the alert.
And what are you doing on this fine Saturday morning?

Yours Truly,

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