The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Salad greens

Baby lettuceIt's been a month since the deer chomped on the last of our winter greens, and despite the tasty summer treats I pull out of the freezer I'm starting to crave fresh vegetables.  So I went out to peer into the cold frame which I planted with lettuce and spinach on October 29.

The salad greens were supposed to be big enough to eat in December, but some cold spells knocked them back.  Now they're starting to grow!  Still not quite big enough to eat, but both are starting to put out fresh leaves.  Maybe in a couple of weeks....

Baby spinachMeanwhile, I planted my traditional Groundhog's Day lettuce bed --- a couple of days early because even though the ground isn't what I'd call dry right now, it's only going to get wetter come Monday.  I've been curious about whether the southwestern Native Americans' method of pit gardening would be useful to give my salad greens a bit of insulation in the winter, so I made half of the new bed a pit garden and the other half a raised bed.  (Both are inside a cold frame covered with row cover fabric.)  In a couple of months, I'll let you know the results of the side by side comparison!


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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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