Early May is a great time to harvest chives, cabbages, radishes, pea shoots, kale, cilantro, and herbs from your raised bed garden for salads and smoothies! And we’re talking just four or five weeks after I planted all these guys!
Get your imaginary scissors ready and join me for a walk through my early May kitchen garden!
Chives
Chives are one of the earliest things you can harvest in your spring kitchen garden. I’m letting most of my chives go to flower for chive flower blossom dressing, so I’ll come back later and do a more thorough harvest. For now, I just gather some of my chive shoots like a ponytail and snip with my scissors.
Cabbage
Cabbage is the ultimate cut-and-come-again plant. I’ve been harvesting from my cabbage leaves regularly and making cabbage salad every couple of days. When I harvest, I don’t take the whole head—I just cut a couple of external leaves from the plant and leave the rest to grow more for another day. I pulled some other cabbage to make room for new plants and ended up with so many leaves I’m going to try making sauerkraut and kimchi.
Radishes
Radishes are ready for harvest about 30 to 45 days after sowing the seeds. I look for good shoot growth and check the shoulders of the radish before giving them a gentle tug to harvest. I just pulled a gorgeous bunch of French breakfast radishes.
Pea Shoots
You can leave your shoots to climb up a trellis and grow into peas, or you can harvest from your young greens. That’s right, they’re edible and quite nutritious. If you want the flavor of peas in your salad, try cutting some shoots and tossing them in with your cabbage leaves for a gourmet treat.
Kale
Like my cabbage leaves, my kale plants have already been producing delicious leaves for the last couple of weeks. I’ve been cutting the outer leaves and making myself delicious green smoothies every morning.
Herbs
My parsley is ready, and I’ve been tossing some curled leaves into my salads. I could also cut some oregano and rosemary. My favorite cool-season herb is cilantro, and I’ve been cutting from my six cilantro plants to get leaves for my cabbage salads.
Lettuce
I have some baby lettuce leaves from a Rocky Top lettuce mix I scattered around one of my raised beds. I could harvest some or let them grow a little bigger. I also grew some red and purple mustards that are ready to add a delicious pop of color to my salad bowls. I scattered a mesclun mix in a different raised bed, so I can pluck some arugula, mizuna, and tatsoi from there.
Kitchen Garden Academy
If you want to learn how to set up your own kitchen garden, I have an entire course dedicated to showing you the step-by-step process.
I’ve got 90 square feet of garden space, and my beds still look completely packed even after I just cut a bunch of leaves from different plants. I hope this encourages you that there is a lot you can harvest from a small space and in a short period of time. So much green goodness is waiting for you! No need to wait until August, so go outside and start growing in your own delicious kitchen garden.
