This time of year, things are starting to mature from our late garden like beans, corn, pumpkins. It's also a good time to begin to think about planting a late fall garden. The air temperatures are cool, but the soil temperatures are warm.
One of the things that I like to play on with kids and grandkids is radishes. Radishes are a large, seeded vegetable. When we go to put them in the ground, they are easy to plant. They come up in about seven to ten days and ready to harvest at maturity and about three to four weeks.
Another vegetable we should be thinking about planting this time of year are the leafy greens. Things like kale and spinach in particular; also leaf lettuce, are easy to plant. They will be up within about seven to ten days and you'll be harvesting these within two weeks. If you want to harvest the larger leaves, they will take more like about four weeks.
Let's talk about microgreens. If you haven't planted microgreens, this picks a time to do so. So, what are microgreens anyway? These are those small, immature vegetables, or the leafy parts of things like beets, bok choi, and even sometimes broccoli.
What we do is we see these as very small seeds in the ground directly. A lot of times rather than going directly into the garden, we put them into seed trays or pans. We put them in and lightly cover them, keep them nice and moist. They'll be up from the soil in approximately seven days. It'll take about two to four weeks for them to mature and be large enough to harvest. When you harvest microgreens, really you're just looking for the untender plan above ground to reach somewhere around two inches high, and then we come in and we clip them off with a sharp pair of clippers or scissors.
