Lettuce!

Speaks for itself, doesn’t it?  It’s so pretty I sort of hate to pick it. But I will.  The darker lettuce in the front is Buttercrunch, a nice textured butter lettuce. The lighter green ruffly lettuce at the top is one I picked up at the local home repair center. The red lettuces are also just gorgeous, aren’t they?

This morning I harvested 3 heads of cauliflower, about 2 pounds of broccoli, and the first cabbage head, measuring in at 11″ in the longest diameter of the compact head.  Because the cauliflower and cabbage plants will not produce any more, I pulled them, giving the other plants more room and sun. I’ll replant once the remaining cabbage is a little bigger. The broccoli will stay where they are for about another 3 weeks, at which time they’ll probably just be sending up little weird shoots and flowers.  The advantage of planting like this is that it’s still early enough to put in a few squares of radishes or herbs – something that is a short season producer, as it gets too dang hot down here for me to be out there working.

This morning a man knocked on our door. He was a worker with the landscaping crew that was working next door. He was an older man and wanted to know if I was selling any of the “greens” I had growing!  He mistook all the harvested broccoli plants and pulled cauliflower plants for collard greens (an easy mistake – the leaves are very similar.) I told him, no, I didn’t have collards this year, that those were broccoli and cauliflower plants.  He said that my garden was beautiful, that I was doing a great job of growing vegetables.  He went back to work and I went back inside and looked at this huge bowl of cauliflower and broccoli in the sink, wondering what I was going to do with it all.  I thought it might bless the man who complimented my garden. I picked the prettiest head of cauliflower and a couple of big broccoli chunks and took them to him outside. He was so grateful you’d have thought I’d given him bars of gold.

One of the greatest benefits of growing a vegetable garden is that I always have enough to give away. Isn’t abundance grand?

Happy gardening!