A couple of days ago I stepped out of the house during Little Man’s nap time to do a little gathering from the garden.  As I stood there gazing at its splendor, I felt a wave of panic wash over me as it finally dawned on me the extent of how many greens I’d planted.  I remember when we first moved to the American Midwest and I was horrified by the lack of greens available in the stores.  Miles of ice berg lettuce, but only a few sad strands of wilted chard that were egregiously overpriced.  So this year, with the massive garden plot at my disposal I went nuts at the seed counter of the local nursery.  And apparently I was transfixed with the greens, since I planted purple kale, dinosaur kale (aka Tuscan kale, but I’m the mother of a toddler so dinosaur it is), rainbow chard, all of the lettuces I’ve already spoken about, AND there are rows of beets with their gorgeous greens as well.  Oy!

Tuscan kale, rainbow chard, mystery pumpkin, beets, carrots, radishes and nasturtiums… Oh my!

This week at the garden has been all about thinning out the plants that were planted too close.  It was hard at first to rip these precious little plants out by their roots, but I “thinned” them directly into the salad bowl… until that bowl over flowed… and so did three plastic shopping bags.  Remember that moment of panic I mentioned above?

Also beans, beans and more beans.

At that moment Dave walked out onto the deck, stepped over my multiple bowls and bags of greens (including a huge bowl of radishes), and started laughing since even though he could see the evidence of my savagery on the garden displayed across the deck… the garden still looked the same.  A riot of gorgeous greens.

This is the most gorgeous rainbow chard I’ve ever seen. The orange stems are my current favorite, but the red, magenta, yellow and white together make an astonishing sight.