Saturday, April 30, 2011

my cold frame after vacation

Copy of 011

Everything is growing fast now. The lettuce, spinach and escarole are filling our salad bowl. These are plants from last fall, that overwintered in the cold frame. My overwintered beets are also doing well with nice greens now and just starting to form roots.

The overwintered broccoli did not do well. It grew nicely, but then "buttoned", that is, it formed tiny little broccoli heads. I picked them a couple days ago and they made a single small serving. I'm told that broccoli will button when its stressed. I'll pull these plants and make room for something else.

PS. Actually the beets are not doing good. They are bolting with no roots. I suppose they too were stressed by over wintering. I'll pull them soon for the nice greens.

2 comments:

biobabbler said...

Well, that's very interesting re: "buttoned" 'cause I just yesterday harvested my overwintered broccoli (first attempt, ever) and got pretty much one bowl of food. =) It was pretty and purple, but paltry.

My present theory is that they might not have had enough fertilizer (composted manure) 'cause it was v. rainy this spring (which apparently can leach nutrients out of the soil) and I never amended the soil past the planting date.

Anyhow, thanks for bringing that up and WOW your cold frame plants are GORGEOUS. =)

Gail said...

Everything looks good here, bet it is really big now. One year I had spinach come back up after winter (zone 4), I was really surprised. We moved here 5 years ago from zone 8, so this is a real change, I am starting to get the hang of it. LOL.
Gail