What's Growing in the Late November Kitchen Garden: Journal Entry 11/26/12

This volunteer dwarf Siberian kale plant doesn't mind the cold.

Did you eat anything from your garden for Thanksgiving? I'm kind of embarrassed to admit the only thing I harvested was some fragrant lemon thyme that I stuffed inside a locally raised, pastured chicken (along with some of this year's garlic via the pantry), but it wasn't for lack of anything growing out there. It was more like we'd been enjoying freshly picked salads nearly every night for months, so we celebrated Thanksgiving by having things like champagne and grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and apple streusel pie with ice cream for breakfast.

But now the holiday weekend is over, and we're back on our usual veggie kick. It may be late November here in zone 5 Missouri, and we've already had quite a few nights down in the low 20s, but thanks to some floating row cover, old bedsheets, and a few plastic tarps, the kitchen garden is still supplying us with plenty of autumn bounty.

In various 4' x 8' raised beds:

More below. . .
—Salad Blend Siamese Dragon stir-fry mix and Rocky Top lettuce mix from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, direct seeded 9/20/12 over an entire bed (half and half), doing well but slightly frost bit from one night when it froze but was too rainy to cover anything.

—Last few heads of Parris Island Cos and New Red Fire lettuce (they've already been trimmed to the base, I just didn't pull them out of the ground and they're coming back), direct seeded 8/28/12. Parris Island Cos is my new favorite lettuce. Beautiful, flavorful, and amazingly heat tolerant.

—Purple kohlrabi (leaves gorgeous but no bulbs forming, a problem I've had before) and Blue Curled Scotch kale in the same bed as the lettuce, also direct seeded 8/28/12.

—Dwarf Siberian kale in the same bed as above, direct seeded a few days earlier from seeds I'd saved from spring kale plants in an adjacent bed I let go to seed.

—Mizuna, French Breakfast radishes, White Russian kale, Red Russian kale, Blue Curled Scotch kale, and Tuscan kale (also called Dinosaur kale and Cavalo Nero), direct seeded in one bed on 9/20/12, plus a few beet plants from spring that came back to life. Plants are much smaller than the greens seeded in late August, some are frost bit from having the cloth covers touching the frozen leaves on nights in the low 20s (am working on fixing that problem).

—Half a bed of Swiss chard direct seeded back in early spring, ravaged by blister beetles in summer, and looking gorgeous again. Swiss chard is more versatile than spinach, heat tolerant, cold tolerant, and easy to grow from seed). I mixed up a bunch of open packets of different varieties and scattered them across the bed: Charlotte, Orange Fantasia, Pink Lipstick, Sea Foam, and Vulcan (a slightly boring but always dependable giant green variety of Swiss chard that insects seem to bother less than the others).

Also in that bed is a giant Tuscan kale plant from last fall. Instead of pulling up the whole plant, I simply harvest the leaves and they just keep growing back on a longer and thicker stalk. It's about four feet tall now.

—Chives, parsley (six pack of seedling purchased last spring), lavender, and lemon thyme (which is spreading nicely) all still doing well. Chives and parsley are covered each night; lavender and lemon thyme are not.

—My late green bean planting experiment (Slenderette and Masai in the PVC mini greenhouse bed on 8/23/12) froze to death despite being covered with both sheets and heavy clear plastic, but the row of Crosby Egyptian beets next to them is doing well.

In the homemade, unheated greenhouse:

—Lots of volunteer Swiss chard, lots of lemon balm (it's sort of taking over in there, and I should probably do something about it), a couple of chive plants I transplanted back in the spring that haven't really taken off yet, and my trusty pot of Greek oregano.

—The English thyme has died back, the parsley has been eaten by something, and my late cucumber planting experiment (four miniature white cucumber plants that sprouted from direct seeding on 8/28/12) was doing great until some creature ate all the plants down to nothing one night.

So what's going on in your garden these days?

© FarmgirlFare.com, where we've had cold rain all day, our coldest night yet predicted tonight, and a chance of snow, so who knows what will be left out there by tomorrow.