Early Harvest Yummies!

We have been blessed with good growing weather so far this year.  The plants in our raised bed garden are all doing fantastic, as are many of our plants at the "big garden."  We've already harvested the first crop of radishes and are soon to harvest the first planting of onions.  With that, I thought I would provide you with a little bit on your early harvest plants; green onions and leaf lettuce.

~GREEN ONIONS~

You will know when your green onions are ready to harvest when a) the onions start to form blooms or b) you see the white bodies start to peek out above the dirt.  If you want the onions to grow larger, simply break the green tops about half way and fold over.  Onion greens are great in many recipes as well as on top of baked potatoes and in soups.

I haven't tried them yet, but these green onion pancakes look terrific!

Did you know that you can grow green onions in water?  Trim the greens to no more than 2 inches above the white onion body.  Place in a clear glass jar with just enough water to cover the white of the onion.  Be sure to change the water every other day and your onion tops will continue to grow for several more harvests right inside your kitchen!

~LEAF LETTUCE~

Lettuce is something that is super easy to grow, especially leaf lettuce or romaine lettuce.  With romaine lettuce, you can just chop off the bottom part of your romaine heart and put it in some soil and a new head of lettuce will grow.  You can do the same thing with celery.  Leaf lettuce grows from a very tiny seed, similar to a radish seed.  Last year I bought a tape from TSC of both leaf lettuce and radish seeds.  Easiest planting I ever did!  I just cut the length of tape I needed, covered it with about 1/8 of an inch of dirt and that was it.  

In this bed, you can see that the leaf lettuce needs to be cut.  I had radishes planted where the basil and pepper plants are now (between the marigolds and lettuce), but we pulled them all up and they are now being snacked up by my husband and sons!  we put out a few rows of them in the second garden, and will plant them again in the raised beds sometime in August.  You can also see a row of green onions that need to be either pulled or let to grow into bigger onions in the next bed.

There are many different salad recipes on the internet that you can find.  One of our favorite salads is to mix the fresh leaf lettuce with fresh spinach leaves, some onion greens, radishes, cherry tomatoes, sliced strawberries and a handful of almonds.  Top it off with a homemade vinaigrette and it's pretty irresistible.