I'll admit that I'm unimpressed by the lettuce this spring in the cold frame. I suspect the issue is temperature extremes (too hot when I forget to open the glass, too cold when I forget to close the glass) combined with moisture extremes (too dry most of the time, then swamped when water gushes off the roof and onto the baby plants). The over-wintering arugula, on the other hand, is going gangbusters.

Actually I planted this arugula's parents in October 2015. The plants grew, went to seed last spring, then self-sowed replacement rosettes. I picked leaves off and on all winter and am now harvesting the rapini heavily to fill spring omelets. At some point, I'll let the poor plants go to seed and repeat the cycle...but I'm enjoying the meals too much to let them go quite yet. Instead, I'm just enjoying seemingly endless arugula, all from one small packet of seeds sprinkled on the ground eighteen months ago.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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