The beginning of a new garden year

This is my seedling rack.

This is the golden acre cabbage seedlings.

This is the Red Danish cabbage seedling.

These are spinach seedlings.

This is the iceberg lettuce seedlings.

These are some pea seedlings I'll be planting out this coming weekend.

Well it has been awhile since my last post. I have been harvesting those cool season crops which the deer, through their benevolence, have not eaten from the garden. The deer seem most enamored of my lettuce crop, but at the same time they do not seem to care for arugula. The deer have also discovered that they can charge through the deer fencing, so it seems that I shall have to erect an electric fence before spring. Fortunately the deer don't seem to care for members of the brassica family. As such I have been enjoying cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. However, we could not eat it all, so we froze some broccoli and cauliflower and made sauerkraut with the cabbage. We found a terrific way to prepare the cauliflower, we cut it into flowerlettes, and put it and some finely chopped garlic in a ziplock baggie with about a teaspoon of olive oil, shake it up to cover the cauliflower evenly, remove it from the baggie, then bake it in the oven at 400 for ten minutes, turn it over and bake for another ten minutes and then plate it up with a topping of parmesan cheese and salt and pepper to taste. (This works well for new potatoes as well.)

 Now that we have harvested the last of the brassica crops, it is time to start the seedlings for the spring crop. I'll be growing golden acre and red danish cabbage, along with both Atlantic and Early purple sprouting broccoli. I have also started seedlings for both Iceberg and Great Lakes lettuce. I grew both these varieties last spring and the Great Lakes was a great success but the Iceberg was brown and mushing in the middle and turning brown by the time it had formed a head. I am hoping that getting a little earlier start can have them ready before the warmer weather arrives and does it's damage to the heads. It is fortunate that I have so much space in the garden that I am allowed the luxury of using garden space to experiment with crops that really would not justify themselves in a smaller garden.  I also started two types of spinach, a hybrid (Renegade) and an open pollinated variety (Bloomsdale). I hope to have the transplants ready to go into the garden by mid February.