Tag Archives: lettuce

Growing delicious lettuce

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skyphosYou can buy all the fancy lettuce in the world from some of the best stores(like Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Sprouts, etc.)around and you’ll never be able to find one that tastes like this. Even at these stores the produce-if it’s coming in from out of state(and most of it may be)-is at least a week old. You pull some of this lettuce, give it a good rinse, and serve and you’ll have folks asking “what is this?” Lettuce is so easy to grow unless it’s in hot weather. You can still do it, but it takes a little more work in terms of water and shading. You can also start them inside where it’s cooler and then put them out after 2 or 3 weeks which will save you from the direct seeding method. This is Skyphos lettuce from Johnny’s selected seeds. It’s one of our favorites. Growing this in your gardens will ruin it for you when you have to shop and pay those rip-off prices at the grocery stores. Learn how to do it yourself for pennies. Along the way you’ll learn to expect a much better quality of taste for produce and veggies.

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Utilizing all the space in a square foot garden

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efficiency tomato and barbados 060213Here’s a little something-this particular square has already been harvested. It held four-2 star lettuce heads of lettuce. Delicious stuff. I added several trowels full of compost, mixed it up a little, and then replanted. Since it previously held a leaf crop(lettuce), it was time to use either a root or fruit crop. I chose to put in a tomato plant-a fruit category. Knowing that it will take 4 weeks to get large enough to trellis up the vertical grow, I took advantage of the space in front of the tomato plant to grow two mini-heads of lettuce. This particular variety is called Dacine. It will be done in about 25 days. That’s good news too because it’s going to be hot here, and lettuce is hard to sprout and grow in weather that warm. I think you can see that they’ve already come up, and now I just have to keep it well watered and covered and it will be perfect. When the first frost hits sometime in September or early October, the tomato plant will be done and it will then be time for me to replant with a cool crop-another 4 heads of lettuce. By the end of the year, this one square foot will have produced 10 heads of lettuce and probably 10 pounds of cherry tomatoes.

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Gardening transition

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TWE garden transition5 -52613As I put my gardens away at the end of fall, I always get a little sad. It’s the end of something I really enjoy doing. I talked a lot about how much easier it is to garden a lot longer into the fall and even into the winter, but the change of gardening season is still a little bit of a bummer for me. As I get my summer gardens up and planted, I feel the same sadness about the departing spring. We’ve been eating mighty well around here all winter, and the spring has been equally as good. All those things that love warm weather are now in-at least a lot of them are. Gone are spinach, radishes, tatsoi, mizuna, and minutina. I’ve got a last harvest of arugula and 2 or 3 squares of bok choi left which will be gone in less than a week. I’ve still got a good supply of lettuce-after all, what good is it if you’ve got all those great tasting summer tomatoes and no lettuce? I’ll grow lettuce all summer, but it’s a lot more work to do that. I don’t mind because the quality of the food is just not equal with anything you can buy. So, it’s good-bye to spring and hello to summer. Tomatoes, lettuce, onions, carrots, peppers,, cucumbers, beans, chard, scallions, basil, cilantro, rosemary, chives, parsley, potatoes, squash, and zucchini are all in now. And more will be planted in the coming two weeks. Big news coming soon for me with my little side business.

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So easy

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cross look at lettuce-051313The SFG method is so easy. You can take all sorts of classes, become a certified instructor, read a lot of books on it(a great thing), teach others how to do it, etc. But it’s all just this simple: build a box, fill it with Mel’s mix, put a grid on it, and then start planting with the 1, 4, 9, 16 spacing. Keep your gardens watered correctly and bingo-that’s it! I’ve been harvesting all year at this point with no break and now the efforts are starting to pay off. I’ll keep my gardens covered at night just in case it gets a little too cold, but the hard work of covering and uncovering every day is coming to an end very soon. Several of the summer crops are already in-tomatoes, cucumbers squash, and peppers. If you live in the Salt Lake City area, keep an eye out for the upcoming SFG “Lite” classes. You can find more information about them on the site. Can’t wait for the summer gardening season…

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You don’t have to buy new seeds every year

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conceptThis time of year finds many of us out planting away with some brand new packets of seeds. In the square foot gardening method, we only plant what we intend to eat, in other words, if we know we will eat 20 salads in a week we will only plant 20 seeds(5 squares.) And if you’re not that confident that your single seed in each hole will come up, maybe you’ll plant 40 seeds. Either way, you’re still going to save 98% of that seed packet during your first year. If you went into a nursery and told them you’ve got some seeds left over from the previous year, you know what you’re going to hear. “Those are no good-you’ll need to buy some new seeds.” My experience, as well as many others, says otherwise. Seeds need three things to grow: warmth, light, and moisture. To store your seeds so that they will be good for many years down the road you simply reverse that process. You’ll need to store your seeds in a place that is “cool, dark, and dry.” That usually takes us to the crisper section of the refrigerator. Done this way, you will have seeds that may last up to 10 years! Right now I’ve been able to sprout tomato seeds that are 10 years old this year. Many of my seeds are 4, 5, or 6 years old. While it’s true that you lose a percentage of viability over time, all that does it tell us that we will not be planting 2 or 3 seeds in each hole, but maybe more like 6 or 7 if the seeds are really older. It’s not necessary to buy seeds every year, although the temptation is almost too much to take when the seed catalogs start arriving in the dead of winter. This picture shows concept lettuce which was started with seeds that were 5 years old.[ois skin=”below post”]