This winter week in the hoophouse, Virginia Biological Farming Conference

This post will be mainly photos. Outdoors the weather has been grey and dreary, and November was the coldest in 38 years, according to AgWeb, from the Farm Journal. But in our Virginia hoophouse, crops are growing well, and we have been harvesting salads every day, radishes every week, and have even started harvesting cooking greens. (I say “even” because we still have spinach, kale, collards outdoors too, which we normally harvest while we can.)

Koji greens in our hoophouse in late November.
Photo Pam Dawling

We’ll start harvesting the outer leaves of these Koji greens soon. Koji is a hybrid, rather like the open pollinated Yukina Savoy. Here’s our senposai just after I harvested 10 gallons of the biggest leaves:

Freshly harvested senposi. In just three days, the plants had grown enough to be ready for another harvest.
Photo Pam Dawling

Soon we will start harvesting leaves from our Russian kale

White Russian kale ready for harvest in our hoophouse at the end of November.
Photo Pam Dawling

.For salad mixes, we are harvesting outer leaves from the leaf lettuces, along with spinach, Bulls Blood beet leaves, and often the brassica component has been tatsoi.

Outredgeous lettuce in late November. The persistent galinsoga shows that our hoophouse has not yet reached freezing temperatures.
Photo Pam Dawling

Tatsoi, which we sowed September 6, has been very prolific. We have been harvesting the outer leaves and chopping them for salad mix, after removing the stems. These causes the patch to look messy, but feeds us well.

Hoophouse tatsoi in late November, with harvested plants to the lower right and not-recently-harvested plants to the left.
Photo Pam Dawling

Once we’ve chosen our basic three ingredients (lettuce, spinach/chard/beet leaves, and a brassica), we customize the mix with other ingredients, such as Tokyo bekana, baby chard or frilly mustards such as Scarlet Frills, Golden Frills and Ruby Streaks. We are harvesting our first sowing, cutting outer leaves, and thinning our second sowing.

Our second hoophouse sowing of frilly mustards. Here you see Golden Frills and Ruby Streaks.
Photo Pam Dawling
Our first hoophouse sowing of scallions is ready for harvest.
Photo Pam Dawling

Looking to the future, the first sowing of baby lettuce mix is almost big enough to harvest. We grow both leaf lettuce to keep alive all winter, and several sowings of baby lettuce mix to cut whenever it is big enough. Growing both gives us more resilience when the weather is so unpredictable.

Red Round turnips are beautiful, and the tops make good cooking greens.
Photo Pam Dawling

We’re also looking forward to turnips and chard.

Our second hoophouse planting of Bright Lights chard.
Photo Pam Dawling

The Virginia Biological Farming Conference will be held January 11-13, 2019 in Richmond, VA. See you there! See my Events page for more about my presentations.