Eat those large outer leaves every day
Now that your spring garden is in full swing, take advantage of your spring vegetables while they are at their best. Get out there every day with your salad bowl and harvest the large outer leaves from each plant. You should be able to see some space between each plant. This will also help keep the slug population down.
If you already have peppers and eggplants in your garden, PLEASE make sure to give those plants their space. If the spinach and lettuces start to get too close to the peppers, tomatoes and eggplants they won’t grow! The best thing you can do is harvest, harvest, harvest every day. Give it away to your neighbours, friends and family! Bring it to dinner parties! Share the wealth! See harvesting tips with help from Danika.
The roquette, rapini and bok choy will surely have gone to flower if you haven’t been harvesting them religiously. The roquette – especially the Adagio – will send up a big thick furry central stalk. You should cut this off at it’s base to keep your roquette going.
You can simply cut off the top flowering sections and add them to stir fry, or salads. You can also remove the whole rapini or bok choy plant, roots and all. These will be coming out as soon as it is time for your summer planting anyway.
Unless your garden was planted very recently, your carrots and beets should have come up by now. It is important to thin them to give each seedling it’s space. Carrots need about 2″ each, beets need about 3″ each. It is best to cut the excess carrot seedlings with scissors, but the beet seedlings you can transplant if you have empty spots in the garden.
More details on thinning and cutting flowers in my video with guest host Luca
Make sure to water, water, water. If your plants are looking smallish, chances are you are not watering enough. Even though the surface of the soil will dry out, if you stick your finger in the soil, it should be humid all the time.
Here is a gorgeous kale salad recipe I like. But really, most days I just go outside with my salad bowl, pick a couple of leaves from each plant and squeeze some fresh lemon, olive oil, sea salt and cracked pepper. Yum!