Tag Archives: corn salad

Plantings of Mache in my square foot garden

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This is such a great and tasty gem that many in the U.S. are not familiar with. I finished teaching a class last night and ended up having a discussion with a couple of the attendees. Somehow we ended up talking about things being harvested during the winter season and I mentioned “mache.” 

“Did I just hear you say mache?” She’s from Germany and knows this crop well. She commented how much she love and misses it. Mache is next to impossible to find here in the states but that’s very different in Europe. The MBC (mache, brassica, and chicory) salad is iconic in many parts of Europe. 

This plant was discovered long ago on corn or wheat fields in Europe. When they found that it was edible (and delicious), and even did better grown as a winter crop, it became a favorite winter crop of peasants. It’s thought of as a winter annual. 

Mache is so good it goes by 3 different names: mache, lambs lettuce, and corn salad. There are two types of varieties that can be found. One is Dutch variety-which has larger leaves and is said to grow better as the weather gets warmer. My favorite is the other-the French variety, often known by the name Vit. It’s smaller and has always done very well in my winter garden. It’s highly nutritious and makes a very distinctive and tasty salad. 

In an effort to see if mache can be grown in late winter, I planted 3 squares of Vit in my SFG today. This is planted in a 9 per square spacing. 

 

Winter planting the square foot gardening

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Winter gardening in northern Utah isn’t really gardening. It’s all harvesting. That means a little extra planning. The important point isn’t really the average first frost date but rather the first day we go under 10 hours of sunlight. For us, thats around November 14th. This is just one of my 4X4 SFG boxes planted for the winter. So far, the timing looks good. What’s in there? Lots. Three different kinds of lettuces, green onions, arugula, minutina, claytonia, spinach, turnips, mache, red pontiac potatoes, and tatsoi. They all love the cold and even freezing weather, except the lettuces. The baby leaf lettuces will easily make it right through the winter months. Get those gardens planted!!! 

Winterized square foot gardens

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You cant tell what’s under there now but you’ll see it when winter gets here. I have 2 or 3 empty squares left to plant for the winter garden, which will be radishes and corn salad at this point. We’ve had 2 hard freezes, and that’s made the carrots very sugar-like. My brother was visiting from California-I gave him one to taste. His comment: “I don’t remember ever tasting a carrot like this.” Thats what the winter garden is all about. Starches turning to sugar in a protective manner, kind of like the plants antifreeze system.

 

There’s not really a lot of new things in this years winter garden. The one new item I’m really looking forward to harvesting is parsnips. That, along with turnips, will make an excellent soup. Snow coming this weekend!

Winter garden makes it through

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This will be a short post about the tasks I’m doing now. Really, its all just preparation. This is the time to order seeds and to warm up your soil. We can still count on some snow and freezing temperatures but spring time is a couple weeks away.

For our climate, there is little advantage in planting before April 1st. I’ve done the experiments of planting on January and February 1st, Presidents day weekend, and the first week or two in March. When I compare that to what I plant the first week of April, it’s obvious that the extra work doesn’t get you much. Many of the crops don’t make it, and the ones planted in March easily catch up to those planted earlier.

I like to plant, spinach, chard, radish, bok choi, and some different kinds of Asian greens such as tatsoi and tokyo bekana. These are easy to grow and are direct seeded. April 1st marks the time for me to begin the summer crops: tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, and peppers.

The picture you see is the winter garden. I planted that in late summer, covered it, and did virtually no work. I don’t think I even looked underneath the cover for 2 months! Its loaded with claytonia, corn salad, green onions, rosemary, spinach, lettuces, etc. I’ll post this later in the summer time for those who want to learn how to do it, the timing, and the crops to grow successfully[ois skin=”1″]

Preparing for spring

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A little hard to believe-tomorrow we begin the first day of 10 hours of sunlight. This means we’ve come out of the Persephone period and plants will now begin to grow. It will be slow at first but will pick up as spring approaches. There’s still a lot of winter weather to deal with but the garden is ready to be warmed up. Some of the garden has been over-wintered and looks very good.

I usually begin covering my garden with plastic the first week of February so the soil will be ready to plant by February 17th. This year I’ll wait until the first week of March. The reason? I don’t seem to get ahead by the earlier starting date but it does add to my workload.

The next couple of weeks I’ll be selecting and ordering seeds. If you’ve been on my site much, you’ll already know my favorite places to buy. Johhny’s, Burpee, Jungs, and Territorial Seed. There’s a local place I like to buy from-Mountain Valley Seeds.

Crops I’ll be planting will be my regular early spring crops: several varieties of lettuce, spinach, claytonia, beet greens, tokyo bekana, corn salad, chard, bok choi, and maybe radicchio. My cool weather herbs have always been cilantro and chives[ois skin=”3″]