We made a stir-fry last night with some of the greens from the garden:  red kale, spinach, mizuna, mustard greens, and leeks.  It’s not totally out of the ordinary to find these growing fairly well in a January garden around here.

However, it is a little unusual to find carrots and radishes growing mid-winter — even when I’ve got the row covers over the beds.  It takes a certain amount of warmth (or lack of hard freezes) for these guys to grow like this:

Unfortunately, the carrot was kind of anemic, and the radish tasted fine but the texture was lacy.

And, along with the warmth comes the bugs — so not only did I bring in greens, but also a big brown caterpillar (boys loved checking him out) and a couple of bluish aphid colonies on the kale.

Oh winter….where art thou?