When plants protect one another - Magenta Spreen

Magenta spreen ... my husband hates it, because it literally invades every small angle in the garden and it is loads of work to clean up. On the other hand I love it, because it protects little seedlings from cold weather and is one of the first crops one can harvest in bulk.



Of course also other plants do the same trick, but I would like to show you the difference of a lesson learnt from just being lazy and in autum leaving the seeds for the birds, that simply love the food.

In the photo part of my harvest - I will show you what I cooked with it in another post.

All of the seedlings and plants  were put into the ground more or less the same day. There may be one or two days of difference between one and the other.

These little seedlings just start growing. I actually thought, some bird picked the seeds out of the ground, but no, they very likely did not grow, because it was too cold (below freezing point during the night).

This is the other bed, where magenta spreen was growing and letting go to seed last year, just before I harvested quite an amount of plants.  You can see there is quite a mix of stuff around.

And here you go: these radishes and carrots grew between the tree spinach, that is magenta spreen. The radishes partly are already ready to harvest, which I did not even notice until I started to harvest. 

 There are also three little potato plants, that very likely grew from mini potatoes I did not find when harvesting, that survived the nights below zero. They normally would have died ... and therefore, of course I do love my magenta spreen, because it definitely cares about it's neighbouring plants.

We are finally well above zero during the night and I hope we won't have late frosts coming along ...