Volunteer green garlic, radish microgreens and overwinter purple sprouting broccoli.
When planting garlic in the field, cloves will fall into the isle ways and eventually get trampled on.... and there are always few heads that are not fully harvested later in the year, with parts of the head left in ground. We find the following year many of these neglected bits resprout in the winter, so we pull them up for 'green garlic' and use them in our evening meals.
We've been playing around with microgreens this past winter, cluster seeding in shallow pots in the greenhouse and harvesting the small leaves when they reach 1-2" tall. We use them in salads, have made pesto from them and tonight, we'll be using these hardy, spicy radish greens in our veggie stir fry.
Overwintering spouting purple broccoli is a farm favorite here. It's a long season open pollinated plant that takes 200 days to mature. It's planted in late summer/early fall in the rows that the garlic was harvested from after the rows have been amended with well composted poultry manure. Come February/March/April (depending on when you planted) the plants produce a single small, main head, followed by an abundant crop of side shoots that are tender, sweet and very tasty.
Low labor goodness in the winter months. Can't beat that!
Follow me 