Design

It's a great time of the year to enjoy late spring greens, while anticipating summer vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, and squash to come. I love the combination of textures and colors in these greens in the Snell Vegetable Garden (at the South Carolina Botanical Garden). a mix of greens

I sowed more seeds this evening.  It's exceptionally warm in the mountains, with teasingly warm soil.  I'm quite sure it's too soon to sow beets and carrots (I did anyway), but an Asian green from Burpee  (Senposai, a cool-sounding hybrid between cabbage and mustard spinach-Komatsuna) might do well, along with a Japanese turnip variety from a local seed company ( Sow True ) called Shogoin. My spinach, peas, and chard have all emerged, but I was chastened by seeing an extremely productive bed of overwintered chard and spinach near the local whole foods/organic market.  Yikes, the spinach leaves were giant (uh, thanks to 10-10-10?) and the chard looked big, too, for this time of year,  And this was just in a small front-yard veggie garden.  Hmm.    Or maybe they just hadn't harvested the spinach, so that's the reason for the big leaves....or it's some enormous-leaved spinach variety?

Working out in the garden this morning (mostly weeding winter annuals), I was admiring my flats of salad mix, Asian greens, and young spinach and radicchio seedlings. Of course, there are young plants in the ground, too, but the flats are particularly pretty! It's so easy to sow mixes of lettuce and greens in flats or containers or window boxes, it's worth doing even if you aren't really a vegetable gardener.