Bitter Greens Ahead?

Plant babies in the garden, enjoying some cool weather.

Cool season crops, planted a few weeks ago from transplants that I started indoors, have taken hold in the garden and are looking very promising.

The past couple of weeks of very warm weather, though, have me wondering whether these great looking little plants will have the chance to become tasty additions to our meals.

Lettuces, spinach, beets, and cilantro (there is a short row of kale further back) are the cool season crops that are shown here. We call them "cool season" crops because they can survive some very cold weather.

Closer view of a little lettuce. March 2016.

They won't grow much while it is freezing cold, but as spring comes along and moderates the air and soil temperatures, they grow quite well.

They will even grow in the summer, but the flavor is not nearly as good, especially for lettuce, which gets bitter enough that tasting it is an experience most of us would prefer to miss.

In addition, lettuces and all the rest tend to send up flowering shoots (we call this "bolting") as the temperatures rise into the eighties, and in a spring like this one the leaves might not have a chance to get big enough to make much of a meal before the plants all bolt.

I know some kale fanatics who grow kale all through the summer, since it is one of the few cool-season crops that doesn't bolt and turn bitter in the heat, and they claim that it tastes good, but I have eaten summer-grown kale and it is not as sweet as the winter kale. To me, this makes a big difference. I will keep the spring kale in the garden until I need the space for summer veggies, but that won't be any later than mid-May. By then, it will already be less tasty.

In the meantime, slightly cooler days have returned for a brief while. If we end up with a very short spring, with early high temperatures that mess with my plants, my gamble with the spring crops will be a loss. This is a case, though, of "you can't win if you don't play," so I will be glad that I tried, regardless of the outcome. Some years, this gamble pays off very well, and we have wonderful lettuces and other cool-season crops until well into May. The great news is that, if the cool season crops don't work out now, I will have another chance in late summer to start more for fall.

Salad Days

A tasty part of tonight's supper.

I went out early this morning to harvest lettuce for our lunchboxes, and again after work for our supper. When I went out in the early dark, the air was heavily perfumed with honeysuckle. This evening, the fragrance was less pronounced, but it was there -- glorious.

In the garden, lettuces are looking great, we still have radishes to pull, and there are a few green onions remaining.

Future supper ingredients.

 The peas are looking ever more promising, too. Pods are are hanging on the lower sections of the vines, while the tops of the plants are still covered in blossoms. 

The Future of Supper

Spring is finally warming up, and in a big way. I've brought in a lot of the lettuce to store in the fridge, because the upcoming several-days-in-a-row of above 85 degrees F weather is likely to make what's left in the garden turn bitter.

Peas beginning to form.

Some of the other crops, though, are approaching their most shining time in the garden. One of those crops is the peas, which are beginning to make actual peas in the several areas where they are planted.

Two of those patches will be left to make food for humans, the rest will be cut down -- some to feed to my pet bunnies (who love pea shoots), and some to turn into the soil to feed the microscopic critters underground.

Potato foliage in the foreground, Allium family crops in the back.

The foliage on the potatoes is looking good, too. The little flowers indicate that potatoes are beginning to form underground.

Over the weekend, I added more compost around the leafy stems, partly to keep the soil as cool as possible for as long as possible, and partly to add a little more depth around the stems.

In general, potatoes are more productive when soil is "hilled" around the stems of the plants. The close spacing in these beds doesn't leave much room for hilling up the nearby soil, but adding more to the top of the bed should have the same effect. At least, that's the dream!

T

Big basket of spinach, that cooked down to about three cups.

Strawberries under netting.

I brought in the spinach over the weekend, too. It looked like a lot of food when I packed it all into the basket to bring inside, but that whole load of leaves cooked down to only about three cups.

We divided the cooked leaves into three portions and put them in the freezer for future meals.

Joe and I had been talking last week about our version of Shepherd's Pie; when the potatoes are ready to harvest, we are going to want this spinach to make some.

Cilantro bolting to flower in the warmer days of May.

The strawberries are starting to add their bright color and flavor to meals (we had some last night). Straight from the garden, they taste like spring!

Other berries in the yard are in flower, but it will be a few more weeks before any of the brambleberries are ready for eating.
As the days have begun to warm, the cilantro has decided that it's time to finish its life cycle and put out flowers and seeds. No one is especially happy about this development (it seems early), but I will be planting seeds for more, soon.

Meanwhile, we will all just enjoy what we have. Joe and I will be using some of the larger leaves from closer to the base of each plant in some guacamole tonight, and our bunnies will be eating some of the taller flowering stems that have bolted up from the base.

There is a little trellis behind the cilantro patch that I've planted a few "Greasy Beans" underneath. When the cilantro is finally in sad enough shape that I pull it up, there will be beans twining up from behind to fill that space. In my mind, it is already beautiful.

And this last picture isn't of plants (or supper), it is of two Best Friends, Holstein and Darwin -- two of my pet bunnies. Holstein is less symmetrical than she used to be. Her face is a little lopsided, and she lists to the right when she walks. The vet said she'd had a "neurological event," which I'm interpreting to mean that she'd had a stroke. She and Darwin are usually pressed right up together, even when they are eating their bunny salad. They are happy to eat the good food that is growing in our garden!

Holstein and Darwin think everything grown in the garden is for them.

The Seven Kinds of Sweet Potato Amy Likes Best

Does anyone else love the book "Harold and the Purple Crayon"? We must have read that book aloud to our kids -- along with a couple hundred more of their favorites -- about a thousand times. One of my favorite lines has always been about "the nine kinds of pie that Harold likes best." When I was setting up my little sweet potatoes to start slips for planting in May, I was reminded of the pies.

I know that seven isn't the same as nine, but it still seems like a lot. I had managed to save six half-gallon cartons for starting them in, but I had to rustle up one more long, shallow container at the last minute.

Five of Amy's sweet potato varieties, making slips for planting in late May.

Two more sweet potato varieties making slips for this summer's crop.

To be honest, I haven't even tasted all of these yet, so I don't know if they are my favorite in terms of flavor, but three were given to me by a sweet-potato-loving friend. We had met through the Extension office, when he was looking for a variety called Alabama Nugget. I told him about a place in Alabama that sells a pretty large assortment of sweet potato varieties, but mostly to small farms, so they are sold in bundles of 100.

My new friend is retired, so he just got in his truck, along with another friend, and they drove to the farm in Alabama. Since everyone involved loved sweet potatoes, it was easy to make more new friends, and the farmer and his (grown) son were very helpful.

My friend has been out to the farm in Alabama a few more times, and he has shared with me what he has learned along with some different sweet potato varieties that he is hoping will come close in flavor and texture to his favorite, but lost, Alabama Nugget.

Of course, Beauregard is one that most people know. It grows big and cooks up soft and sweet.

Purple Delight is much drier, almost like a dry Irish-type potato, and it is hardly sweet at all. It is a great addition to a mixed pan of roasted vegetables. The tubers grow almost straight down, and they are long enough that when a plant is harvested, if you get it up without breakage, it looks kind of like a purple octopus.

Porto Rican Gold is the heirloom from my friends Jack and Becky; it's the one that Becky's family grew commercially a hundred years ago in this county. The family has perpetuated the line all this time, but Jack and Becky are the last in their family to continue to grow it. I shared it with my new friend, so it would have a better chance of continuation.

The Annie Hall is paler fleshed, drier in texture than Beauregard, but with a different flavor. I like it a lot, but it is not a very productive variety. Last year I only had enough to eat two of them.

The others -- Covington, Alabama Red, and Calvert/Cape Hatteras -- are all new to me. I'm looking forward to growing them!

To start the slips, I have placed the tubers in a mixture of sand and compost that will be kept moist. There already are plenty of little sprouts showing, so I am hopeful that I will have enough to fill the garden. The sweet potatoes have one of the larger spaces in my yard's rotation this year.

Anyone looking for more detailed growing information might try the Organic Gardening article "Sweet Potato Growing Guide."

Elsewhere in the garden, other established crops are doing well. The long bed of allium family crops that were all planted last fall still looks good.

Multiplying onions, garlic, shallots.

The cilantro is making everyone happy. Joe loves it, I love it, my six pet bunnies love it!

Fall-planted cilantro is large and leafy in spring.

And of course, the lettuces are looking good and adding nice color to our meals. There had been radishes in the spaces between the lettuce plants originally, but we've eaten most of those. Luckily, I've started more here and there throughout the garden. We eat a lot of radishes. There were some thin slices on the sandwich I made for yesterday's lunch.

Lettuce!

More lettuce! And inter-cropped radishes!

Hope that everyone else's gardens are growing well!

Spring Harvest (!) and Soil Temperatures for Planting

My first real harvest of spring-planted veggies:

Cilantro, Black-seeded Simpson lettuce, Purple Plum radishes  PHOTO/Amy W.

The garden hasn't yielded much since January 1 -- a last little bit of broccoli before the hard freezes, a few green onions, some carrots -- so the lettuce, cilantro, and radishes that I harvested yesterday mark a turning point in the gardening year. They also made a great contribution to "taco night"!

As the spring crops mature to harvest stage, the planting for summer crops needs to begin. North Carolina State University has published a planting chart/calendar that includes soil temperatures to help us all work out the best order in which to plant our gardens. Gardeners who also have jobs, families, and other additional responsibilities don't usually manage to get the garden planted all at once, and knowing which plants can do well in cooler soil temperatures can help gardeners decide what to plant first.

According to the chart, corn can be planted at soil temperatures as low as 50 degrees F, and so can pole beans, but squashes and tomatoes need a minimum soil temperature of 60 degrees F, peppers and cucumbers need 65 degrees F, and okra, melons, eggplants and Southern peas need a soil temperature of at least 70 degrees F to do their best.

For those of us in Cobb County who are planning to put seeds in the ground this coming weekend, taking a thermometer out to check on the soil temperature at a 4 inch depth at various points around the garden can help determine what to plant. In my yard, the soil temperature is approaching 60 degrees F, which means there is a lot I can plant now. It also means that I might need to replant those cucumber seeds that I put in the ground last week, when the soil temperature was a little lower.

Fall Planting, Continued

I've made more progress in getting the fall crops planted, but I am beginning to fall behind. It's almost mid-September!

Last Saturday morning, I planted 102 cabbage-family plants out at the little farm on Dallas Highway where I volunteer. Joe was out of town, and most of the rest of the volunteers had been busy on the tractors the day before. That left just me to prepare the beds, space the transplants, make the holes, set in the little plants, water, then give each plant a shot of fish-emulsion as starter fertilizer. Can I just mention here that I was pretty tired after that long morning? 

In my own yard, I worked on clearing away the parching corn and preparing that space for planting. Then yesterday after work I managed to get my cabbages and broccoli in the ground.  Rabbits had eaten the tops off of most of the little plants that I had started from seed  -- I had set the tray of plants out in the yard, where the seedlings would get plenty of sunshine -- which means that about 3/4 of those plants in my garden now are from a garden center. This morning, though, they all still look good.

The carrots, winter radishes, beets, spinach, and patch of buckwheat (as a cover crop) that were planted earlier are up and growing. There are a few gaps here and there in the rows of vegetables where I will need to put in a little more seed, but not many.  The long stretch of rain that we had this year has made it seem weird to have to water the seedlings, but that's what I've had to do -- stand out in the yard with a hose to make sure the little seedlings don't dry up and blow away.

I still need to get the lettuce (and other various) seedlings into the ground, and I have some other seeds to plant. If all goes well, I'll manage to finish it all sometime this coming weekend.

Meanwhile, the patch of green beans that I planted in early July is providing plenty of beans, there are still peppers and tomatoes coming in, the eggplants look as though they are putting on a new flush of flowers, the sweet potato vines are sprawled all over the place, and just looking at all that exuberant growth makes me smile.

Hope everyone else's fall planting is on track!

Rain, Rain, Rain and Still More Rain

Eventually, I will finish getting the summer crops planted, but at this rate it might be June before they're all in. We had yet more rain over the weekend, which made the soil too wet for digging and planting. I put in a couple more tomato plants anyway, turned the compost pile and did some weeding, but there are still two whole beds and two partial beds that are not set for the summer.

Last May was a big harvest month, with potatoes, zucchini, onions, and quite a lot of green beans coming into the kitchen, but this year those crops will be pushed into June. However, things could be worse. I have heard from plenty of gardeners who already are contending with disease issues -- from the cool, wet weather -- in their gardens. Other gardeners also have said that some seeds that were planted rotted before they could germinate.

Currently, it's a mix of cool and warm season crops.

The slugs have begun to make an appearance, but  they aren't in the lettuces at this point. If the rain doesn't let up, I expect a population explosion.

In the meantime, I will just enjoy what I have. The tomato plants are growing slowly in the cool spring weather, but they look healthy, and they are flowering. The lettuces are in Great Shape, which means there is salad with supper, salad with lunch, and more the next day, and the next. 

Last beet of the season.     PHOTO/Amy W.

There are a few carrots left in the ground, but not many, and the radishes are almost all harvested, too. The peas are starting to make, and I'm looking forward to including those in our meals, but everything is running behind -- and not just compared to last year, when everything was freakishly early.

One of the great things about gardening is that there is so much to think about. I am never bored!

First Frost in Our Yard!

We heard that there was a frost coming, but very few of the plants currently out there needed protection. However, I was hoping to be able to help the potatoes through the night; they are very tender.

I piled leaves around the stems and draped a flannel sheet over the patch, but the freeze was deeper than just a little dip down to 32 degrees.

In the end, the measures I took weren't enough. The stems of the potato plants (and the nasturtiums) turned to mush.

The good news is that, even though most of the spuds had only pushed plants up out of the ground a month or so ago, a couple had come up earlier, and there was a little harvest to dig up today.

When I had dug up last spring's potatoes, I had saved some of the little ones in the fridge to replant in August. I was hoping to trick the little spuds into thinking that their dormancy period was over, but the trick only worked on a couple of them. I'll have to rethink the plan next summer to figure out a way to get a more abundant autumn harvest. I'm pleased enough that the couple of early-birds produced a few spuds for us, and we are looking forward to eating them.

Along with the spuds, I brought in some broccoli to serve with tonight's supper and a winter radish to have sliced thin and salted with our pre-dinner snacks. The potatoes will be for another day.

The freeze wasn't hard enough to harm the cauliflower, which is good, because they are the most tender of the brassicas out in the yard. Broccoli and cabbages can take much lower temperatures without harm.

We had one of the cabbages - the first of the season! - with our Thanksgiving Day meal. There are more that are getting close to harvest-size.

Elsewhere in the garden, the garlic are still all below ground, but the shallots are coming up.

The lettuces are still perking away - but we've had a lot less of these than my bunnies have. Moonpie and her babies are pretty big lettuce-eaters.

Overall, I'd have to say that the yard made it through this first very late frost in good shape. The weird part is that it Really Was the First Frost! I think that the official UGA weather station in Dallas, GA, recorded a frost about a week ago, but it was on a night for which the temperatures were patchy - my yard made it through that earlier "frost" without any frost at all. Last night - the night of Nov. 24 - was the first for my yard.

I'm not going to complain (I usually expect a first frost around the end of October), but I will say that it's weird.

State of the Garden Report

It's been a great year for peppers in my yard, but the season is just about at its close.

We'll be pulling up the pepper plants (see pathetic plants in photo below) this weekend, because the cool nights have taken their toll on the heat-loving plants. It won't help that the forecast includes a dip down into the mid-thirties within the next few days.

Other plants due for removal this weekend include the last of the eggplants.

If all goes well, I'll get the garlic planted - it's time - but it's probably better if I don't absolutely count on getting that done.

At this point, most of my cool-weather crops are looking very promising. The broccoli will be big enough to harvest soon!

The extra-cold weather heading my way can only help.  There are enough of these in the garden this year to make several good meals-worth of the central heads.

If this winter is anything like last winter and we don't get any hard freezes (with temperatures down into the teens or below), we could get more meals from the little side-shoots, too.

Joe, though, is looking forward to the cabbage harvest. He LOVES sauerkraut, and last year he wasn't able to make enough from the cabbage that was available.

This year, we have a dozen of our own plants to add to any harvested from the little farm where we volunteer on the weekends.

He will have to wait a few more weeks for the cabbage, but the first heads should be ready by Thanksgiving. At our house, the best batches of sauerkraut are the ones that are made in cooler weather. I don't know if that is because the whole process procedes at a slower pace or if it's because the mix of bacteria/fungi in the air is different.

Regardless, we've figured out that he needs to make his sauerkraut in fall, rather than in spring, even though we can grow cabbages that mature in April.

We've been eating some of the lettuces and spinach (not pictured), too. I've fed some of the tiny lettuces - that were pulled to thin the bed - to my bunnies, but I'm planning for most of the lettuce to feed the humans in the house.

This year's carrot patch is looking like it could be the best I've ever planted in this yard. If I am really lucky, next year when it's time to plant the fall carrots I'll be able to decipher my notes about what I did with the soil to make this happen. It's always great to be able to replicate a success.

Weather reports are calling for some fairly stunning storms (can I use the plural form, when what's really supposed to happen is a collision/combination of two?) north and east of here. I'm hoping for the best possible outcome for everyone in the affected areas!

May your hatches be safely battened down, your larders and water-stores sufficient to meet the need, and everyone make it through un-injured.

What's for Lunch?

These are the salad days at our house.

We brought in all the Capitan and Tiny Tim lettuces, and most of the Marvel of Four Seasons (packed into bags in the fridge). The first two don't hold up well in the heat, and I am hoping to find out how well Marvel holds up. I'll be nibbling on the remaining Marvel plant on and off to find out when it turns bitter. Still in the yard are the oak-leaf lettuces (this year those are all Bronze Arrow), which should be fine for a couple more weeks, and the SloBolt, which should be fine into June.

We still have some radishes left in the garden, and the peas, both English and Sugar Snap, have just recently begun making additions to our meals.

Also making regular appearances are the many herbs, both the ones we planted on purpose and the ones that have re-seeded into the yard. There's a lot of dill that I will be thinning soon, and bringing the thinnings in to dry for later use. Last year's parsley is starting to make flowers, but the leaves are still just fine to use. We even still have a little cilantro! All the plants in the sunnier spots went to seed a while back, but the plants in shadier locations still have plenty of usable leaves.

For someone who cooks, herbs are a great choice of plants to grow, because getting them at the store in those little plastic packets costs a small fortune. Today, our lunchtime salad is a pesto-potato salad (on a bed of lettuce) (it has peas in it), for which buying basil leaves would have made me pretty unhappy. I will admit that making the pesto last summer wasn't exactly my favorite activity, but we have been using the frozen cubes of pesto all winter long, and we still have a few more cubes in the freezer.

The Hanover Salad Kale has bolted, along with most of the other earlier greens. That hasn't stopped me from taking more leaves off the spinach plants; they are just a bit tougher than earlier in the spring. Those plants are all coming out soon, though.

In another week or two, the newest Perpetual Spinach Chard will be big enough to add to meals, too. The carrots will be ready at about that same time, and so will the beets.

It is great to have food from the garden on my plate!

Lettuces

The last of the seedling lettuces are ready to go out to the garden. For most varieties, this is way too late to be planting out lettuces in North Georgia, but these are the variety called Slobolt. It can take some serious heat before bolting to bitterness. However, it is not the most tender and delicious lettuce around.



I mentioned Slobolt on the "Gardening in the South East" group at Kitchen Gardeners International, and the organizer of the group (ejmac) said that the lettuce that lasts longest into June for him is Jericho, an Israeli introduction that can stand the heat here but that also has good flavor. Since seeds for that variety are carried by Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, I will probably try it (in a trial next to Slobolt) next spring to see if I like it better.

The spring lettuces that were planted earlier include this one, Marvel of Four Seasons.



I haven't grown Marvel before, and I really like the color. It is supposed to stay fairly unbitter even as it begins to bolt, so I am interested to see whether that is true in my yard. We certainly are having a hot April, so this year makes a good test for the lettuces. Last year it was so rainy in April, then cool through most of May, that almost any lettuce would have done pretty well here.

The other spring lettuce that I'm growing this year is the variety Capitan.



It is classically green, and it is one of those tender and buttery bib lettuces. In another week or so I will begin using leaves from both Capitan and Marvel in salads, but I am still trying to use up the winter-grown oak leaf lettuces. An overabundance of lettuce is not exactly a problem, but the midribs of those are getting bitter, so we will be having huge salads with supper for the next few days.

I have always grown lettuces with the thought that I want to be able to harvest enough to make a whole salad right from the yard. One friend, though, takes a different approach that allows her to grow and use garden lettuces and other salad greens right through the summer.

She grows a whole bed of those "mesclun mixes" and harvests the leaves when they are no more than about two and a half inches long, then adds those to lettuce that she has bought. The baby leaves give more flavor (and probably vitamins and minerals) to the salad. This is an approach that I have not even considered trying before, but now I am going to think about it...