Menlo Park garden in December!

We have had some successes and some failures since November. We also had freezing temperatures for two nights in December, and some of our stuff just didn't make it through that unscathed.

December's view of the four boxes

This first box is the most exciting to me right now because of the broccoli.

Since taking these shots, we have eaten two of the heads with The Desmond Baggotts for our Christmas celebration. It tasted AMAZING!! My only regret is that Ed is missing these tastings.

My kids stood at the stove eating the broccoli, raw without any dip or anything!! Why didn't I plant all broccoli?? Next year :)

The poppy is doing well with lots of new green leave,s but the other two flowers seem to have died (other end of the box). The onions look pathetic on the top, but maybe surprising underneath? The beets are a bit of an experiment. Instead of thinning them when they were little sprouts as recommended, I moved half of them to different locations in the four boxes. Some seem to have worked so more on them later.

The chard is not doing well at all, and the artichoke in this box looks ill.

The cauliflower picture doesn't reflect how pretty it is now. It has easily grown 2x as large by this posting.

I know I didn't mention the Romanesco broccoli yet, but they are so incredibly beautiful. I hope they taste good!

The second box in terms of beauty and production has to be the onions, spinach, arugula, artichoke box shown here:

This artichoke plant looks so much healthier than the other one. I wonder if planting it next to the tall broccoli-type plants has caused some of the problems. This one is the tallest thing in the box and has lots of air flow around it.

Here are the green onions. I need to harvest some of these asap. I just read online that the longer they grow, the more intense their flavor becomes.

The spinach is lovely at the bottom of this picture and the arugula is most of the other greenery that you see. The bacopa hybrida died in the frost which is sad because I think it was my favorite flower that we picked out. The dianthus is doing very well, except for the ones that Quinn just pulled out of the garden for no good reason.

You can see all the volunteer cilantro, our fava bean plants, carrot tops and red chard from seed (top of the picture and difficult to see, but doing well so far).

This shot shows a little of the red chard and the fava bean plants. The fava beans have little black insects so they may not make it. I did spray off the plants the other day in hopes that they might be dislodged (some were).

The box with all the purple cabbage is likely the one box that just doesn't get enough sun in the winter. It certainly gets tons of sun in the summer!

There is one broccoli, one Romanesco broccoli, and one cauliflower plant in this box, and none of them are doing anywhere near as well as the ones in the box that gets more sun.

The yellow chard in this box is a hair more healthy. My guess is the same of the artichoke that I think just doesn't get enough air and sun due to being planted too close to the larger broccoli-type plants. Note to self.

The purple 'Roxanne' cabbage seem to be doing very well. We will see...

Here are the lacinto kale plants and the carrots, also both seemingly doing well. The violas are loving this spot and are still flowering. The nemesia is not flowering now, but still green so there is hope for it.

The box that is having the hardest time of it is the one with the brussel sprouts and lettuces.

The brussel sprouts are looking ok right now, although something ate a bunch of the leaves early on, the plants seemed to have survived. I can see little sproutlettes forming on the stalks. More as they develop.

The lettuces, which went gang-busters for a good stretch, did not survive the frost. The stems rotted and I had to pull out most of them. Two romaine lettuces survived and so did a little frilly lettuce plant. Yum. I will likely plant some new lettuces there as soon as there is a break in the weather. I love having fresh lettuce on hand. The chard and fava beans look horrible in this box. The chards had a rough time with the frost, and the bean plans are overrun with little black bugs. 

I will likely plant some fava beans from seed in the pumpkin patch. If they don't produce beans, they are a great cover crop for that location. I will be planting buckwheat in the original planter to ready it for the spring. 

I found that the mint and nasturtium planted in the summer are of course surviving and I need to dig them out and plant mint in a container. The nasturtium I will likely plant in another area of the garden. They are delicious and beautiful, but weed-like here so I need to have a bit more control (or at least move them out of the raised bed.

Here are the potted herbs. The basil died from the frost, but everything else did fine.

The birds of paradise have new "birds" ready to open. It looks like they are pretty happy so we will see their plumage in the spring.

Finally, I inherited a worm factory when Dan and Erin moved to Seattle. I have finally used the worm juice once and have figured the whole deal out, so it will hopefully help the garden going forward. More on my worms next month. Happy New Year!