Late last year they were giving out straw. Judy Levy said putting a layer of the stuff down is a great way to protect the soil from drying out and keep weeds from sprouting. I figured why not and spread it around most of my plot.

  

Those cabbage balls are about the size of a palmello. Quite a bit bigger than a softball, but not anywhere near basketball size. The master gardener said "they might be ready to harvest", so I picked the one on the left. She said it will last about four weeks in the fridge. I'm currently wondering how to cook it.

Those kale plants are giving me a good sized serving of greens about once a month now. Kale does great things to soup. Yum!

     

The garlic seems to be growing in an unspectacular way. My plan is to harvest it after it dies back.

The spinach seems to be regularly eaten by the birds. I'm thinking that to get anything out of the plants I need to make some kind of bird proof shelter for it. That's going to be my next project.

The collards continue to offer a yummy serving a week or something like that. They didn't grow much while I was gone. I think that's because they didn't get much water, but the fact that it was cold might have had something to do with it to.

     

That tree collard is getting to the point where it's starting to look like it can give me a serving of food sometime in the not too distant future...

The artichoke continues to look like  a happy shrub. So far there is no evidence of artichokes on it.

The red kale plants I planted around Christmas time are doing okay, but they have  a long ways to go before I can start harvesting leaves from them.

  

This was my first broccoli plant to get ready to harvest. The master gardener told me "Cut it off just under the head, above the leaves. The plant will turn its energy towards turning out side shoots at the roots of the leaves and you will get good harvests of smaller flower clusters from it for years." She also wanted me to cut it at a 45 degree angle so that water wouldn't pool in the scar. The preferable direction for the cut was towards the sun, so that the light can dry the cut. This was the first time I'd heard that advice. Now I'm looking forward to harvesting broccoli the way I've been harvesting collards! Yumm....

  

When I planted the broccoli plants I thought they were cauliflower plants. I'd have organized them differently if I'd known I could be harvesting from them for years.

That one cabbage is red even though it came from the same batch as the others. I think it's because I transplanted it after it had been in the ground for a while. Maybe I shocked the roots or something like that. Maybe the problem is that it's in nutrient poor soil. It's hard to know about stuff like that without having seen more plant life cycles than I have.

  

This broccoli was growing much slower than the rest of them. I think it's because I planted it in poor soil and didn't fertilize it at all.