The purple chokeberries are growing a lot better in their new location they've been for a year, the first hyacinth has broke the surface, and some closeups of radish and spinach.

Fuck me, I'm doing this for breakfast now, and actually liking it.

Some of the spinach is up and some leaves on the radishes now. No signs of peas or beets.

A spring gardening surprise: green leaves instead of green shoots

So much is terrible in the world right now, but at least I’m not looking at lettuce as a grocery line-item expense on the first day of spring. That’s not because I’ve renounced leafy greens as a sandwich fixing, but because the spinach and some of the arugula that I grew from seed in the fall somehow survived winter.

Alongside them in the raised bed outside the back patio, parsley and, even less likely, cilantro have staged their own late-winter resurrections.

I can’t imagine why even the most fault-tolerant of these plants should have done that. This winter, unlike many in recent years, not only had extended hard freezes but multiple snow days that left that bed buried in snow for days at a stretch. Even building a cold frame should have been inadequate.

Having done nothing to prolong those crops, I should have had to start from scratch about two weeks before today, scattering dirt and seeds and looking forward to seeing the first green shoots emerge from the soil later this month.

(To anybody reading this intimidated by the idea of starting a vegetable garden: It’s hard to screw up arugula in the spring, and it’s also hard to find a recipe that can’t be improved with a little of it.)

Instead, after 20 years of having this questionably-productive hobby, I now need to decide if want to dig up some of these survivors to try growing some lettuce to mix things up. And if this means that my long losing streak of trying to cultivate tomatoes might be due for a change in a couple of months. This unearned gardening luck is not much in the larger scheme of things, but I’ll take it.

I think last time that I dried spinach myself I used baby spinach. Pretty sure in fact. But this is what I have this time so we’ll see if it’s better, worse, or the same.

Two benefits of eating spinach
#spinach #vegetables #explore #facts #shorts #viral

Planted a row of peas, two rows of beets, six patches of radish, one of spinach, and one of arugula. The patches I just broadcast the seed and 5 fingered it in and tamped. It can be thinned. Skipped the other cleaned bed for now and the frozen end beyond the arugula since it has some grass that needs cleaned out when it thaws.

#Benefits of #spinach for #muscles
https://test5555nm.blogspot.com/2025/03/benefits-of-spinach-for-muscles.html?m=1

@gardening #DisabilityAccessibility
For those with tactile problems &/or mild #neuropathy in your hands. I've a seed recommendation, namely Galilee #Spinach because said seeds beyond being about 1/8 the size of corn, also have spines extending beyond just the ball that's typical of spinach seeds.

Just putting them in to germinate today & I've never had an easier time of handling similarly sized seeds, even as my neuropathy is sizable today. #ChronicLife #Gardening

I got some early seeds to plant and one pepper has sprouted up after 5 days.

What we eat...

Sometimes each member of our household comes up with four favorite #dishes which they like to eat in the upcoming days, from which two dishes are blindly drawn by a different member. This way we currently end up with a list of eight favorite dishes.

Usually we manage to work through the list within about two weeks depending on complexity of the dishes, availability and mood of the "#chef" to #cook and — handwaving — circumstances.

This week's menu:

Korean #Pancakes
Nudelpudding
Daddy's #Soup
#Spinach with "Yummy"
#PotatoesAuGratin
#LasagnaSoup
#PeaSoup
#SpaghettiBolognese

I love spinach but there's a reason I usually eat kale.
#food #spinach #cooking

New publication: #Spinach #seed #microbiome characteristics linked to #suppressiveness against #Globisporangiumultimum damping-off. #seedmicrobiome #bacteria #fungi #yeasts
https://doi.org/10.1093/femsec/fiaf004