MNN - Mother Nature Network

Farmer D: Hey, what’s up, I’m Farmer D. I'm here outside my store, getting ready to do another "Lunch and Learn" series with Chinese Southern Belle cooking. So let me show you a little bit about what’s going on with that and we’re going to eat some fun food. What I want to talk about in the learn part of this, is successional planting so that you can have harvest throughout the season; so I'm going to show you, we’re going to walk over to one of the garden beds and show you just as an example of what we’ve done in this one bed. We’re going to harvest out our spring lettuce and then were going to go ahead and plant our next crop. And follow that with a summer veggie. In this case, cucumbers. So we can all just kind of walk over it, we’re going to be right along the road here, kind of between this black Mercedes and the raised beds. So kind of keep in that area, we don’t want anyone to get on Briarcliff road. We don’t want to have to compost anyone today. It's actually good harvest weather. You know, one of the things we’re worried about in the middle of lunch time, don’t really harvest in the middle of the day. Typically on the farm we go out in the morning, when the dew is still down, it's cool, harvest all the veggies, get them in the cold water, and then by mid-day we’re under the shade prepping everything and washing and sorting and boxing and bagging. And the same thing is true when you're planting, you don’t want to plant in the heat of the day because it just stresses the plant out, so this is morning and evening is really the best time to do planting, but when it's nice and cloudy and cool like this you can kind of take advantage of the daytime and go ahead and do both. We should do this all the time. It’s a great way to use our veggies. Natalie, it’s delicious.

 

Natalie Keng: You grew it!