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.)

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:

Photo Pam Dawling
Soon we will start harvesting leaves from our Russian kale

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.

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.

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.

Photo Pam Dawling

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.

Photo Pam Dawling
We’re also looking forward to turnips and 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.