Fall can be a very productive time for the garden. All the cool weather crops we’ve planted for winter are reaching maturity now, and it hasn’t yet become cold enough to kill the warm weather crops (which right now is mostly just tomatoes, since we weren’t able to plant much for summer due to the flooding this spring). Most of the cool weather crops we planted should continue to be harvestable into winter, and although options are fairly limited now, there are still seeds that can be planted. For the most part, though, plants grow very slowly during the dead of winter, so it is important to have most of what you want to be eating in the winter pretty much full size by late fall.
Endive and escarole, but which is which is confusing with these varieties since they both look more typical of the other type… but it doesn’t matter too much, as they taste similarly. They are both the same species and are actually a type of chicory.The frilly edge of a mustard leaf.This is Tokyo bekana, a plant in the mustard family that is mild enough to use like lettuce.The purple veins of a variety of flowering broccoliMore purple flowering broccoli veinsMizuna, another mustard/cabbage family crop. Sometimes we may rely on this plant family a little too much… it has a huge amount of variety, but many of the ‘different crops’ are actually the same species. This is the same species as the flowering broccoli and the Tokyo bekana, as well as other crops we’ve planted that I haven’t included here.Endive and escarole are not in the mustard family, at least…Most of the tomatoes around just came up on their own, and this one came up pretty close to winter, but nobody wants to just pull it out…
