Well we harvested our leeks. I couldn’t face the thought of mulching them heavily, covering them up and hoping they wouldn’t be so frozen into the ground that I couldn’t dig them out when I felt the need for a batch of leek and potato soup!
The leek section was about 3 feet by 4 feet on the end of the same raised bed on which we grew our onions.
I’d been harvesting a few here and there for the last couple of months taking only the biggest ones. The ones I wanted were not always on the edge of the patch so I used my trusty CobraHead to assist me as I picked and chose. Harvesting is just like weeding in this case except the plants go to the kitchen not the compost pile!
As you can see from the picture the root system is extremely bushy (unlike onions which pop out of the ground quite easily) so one leek’s roots can be intertwined with its neighbor. When that happens I’ll just push the ‘neighboring leek’ back into the ground if it looks like it has a good chance to survive. Otherwise it gets harvested too.
Harvesting the whole patch at once was a little different. We used our digging fork to loosen up clumps of leeks then used the CobraHead to separate them and beat the excess soil from the roots as much as possible.
A little prep time now washing and freezing my sliced leeks will save my sous chef (me) some kitchen time in the winter!