TALES FROM THE GARDEN - What is "Cut-and-Come-Again" Harvesting

We finally have a proper garden, and our suburban homestead is growing! No coincidence our word of the year this year is "growth"... it really is something that works, you know. Last year we chose "progress" and it kept us going forward, closer to our dreams, and deeper into our passion.

If we can't take some time to follow our passions, than what good is it to work a job? It just seems to about making someone else's dream come true?

This was an idea I got from Nicole Sauce's podcast Living Free in Tennessee, check it out, I even had a little challenge I thought would be fun here on Hive to get some of you to find a word to guide you by each year... perhaps I should get it out there again, it was a good idea.

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Back to the Gardening bit of this post!

Cut-and-Come-Again is a technique I came upon accidently while harvesting the outer leaves of our winter garden using the kratky method.

It's really just that simple, I only cut bigger outer leaves of my lettuce heads whenever we wanted a salad, and a few days later there were more leave ready to harvest. That went on all winter basically! Had we more than three heads of lettuce, and one of arugula, we probably would have been able to have enough for salads everyday that winter!

I'll definitely have to make time to build another kratky system, a bigger one for sure. Now that we have a full basement, we're going to turn part of that into a whole different laboratory than the one being developed in the garage. This one will be for all sorts of thing about food. I'm talking fermentation, processing hickory nuts to make nutritious milk, acorns for a wild alternative to nut flour, a pantry, a root cellar and so on...

Here we go again, drifting off... but than again it's about food ain't it?

So, we were about to leave for 12 days.. away from our garden, yes. We found a friend to water it while we were gone, but before we left I decided to look up when and how to harvest pak choi and swiss chard. We had never grown these and so I wanted to do it right. The leaves were getting so big, we had to do something about it before going on vacation.

Of course, the first video that popped out for me was something about cutting the outer leaves (and sometimes the whole head a couple inches from the ground). This method of harvesting is apparently called "Cut-and-Come-Again". And it makes perfect sense, as most plants I have had interactions with regrow more leaves when you cut some off.

This is how much it's grown already since I harvested all that you see in the image at the top of this post. I had left only small leaves (up to about 4 inches long), to let grow!

It is now 3 week later!!! I don't know you, I think it's amazing though.

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As for our broccoli, it bolted early... we planted it too late and the ground got too hot. We'll have to try it again just after the summer cools a bit. It's probably an easier crop to grow in the fall! So we have been eating the flowers. The same sort of thing happens, the more I cut the tops, the more new growth come up, and flower!

It almost feels like we can have an endless supply of food

But I know wit will come to an end, typically gets too bitter sometime between flowering and going to seed. It's ok, I'd like to eat more in season anyway, something about that feels so much healthier.

Soon I will try to show off our corn.. it's over seven foot tall right now!!! Seems crazy to me, but again, that's something I have never own before, so maybe it's perfectly natural for corn to be so lush and tall?