Also known as Miners' Lettuce this green is having its spring flush just now. It is an introduced plant that has escaped into the British countryside. I have grown it as a vegetable crop on my allotment for a couple of years now. Here I am sure it has not been sprayed with herbicide. It looks rather straggly throughout winter, as below, but then it takes off in advance of everything else. Stalks, leaves and flowers (probably root too) are edible. To my surprise it is still mild in flavour after flowering, bot raw and cooked like spinach or lettuce. High in vitamin C it is said to have been used to combat scurvy.
It is worth growing an overwintered row. Like any overwintered crop it is also worth making next year's sowing plan before sowing!
It is raining again today, but yesterday was a surprise sunny day. I took the opportunity to take some snaps of the allotment. First, appropriately, the potato patch.
The shaws are appearing above ground and very soon it will be time to mound them.
Beyond the potatoes is the fruit cage. The first of the three bays was strawberries. Notoriously these have to be moved around in order to avoid build up of disease. So currently this bay is garlic, Elephant to the left, ordinary to the right. In between are two rows of parsnips which are indistinguishable from the germinating weeds currently. But believe me they are there!
The remainder of the fruit cage is more conventionally raspberries and a mixture of currants and berries:
Reaching the turn at the end I am most pleasantly surprised by these autumn planted red onion sets. I had given them up for lost but come the new year they have reappeared and are thriving.
Also at that end are spring planted onion sets (tent to the left ) Carrots (temple to the right) and leeks between them. Next is onions and shallots from seed (I went a bit mad on alliums this year) and the start of the brassica patch in front of that in the picture below.
Working back to the start I have covered the ground, temporarily with weed suppressant fabric. This is going to be the the other half of the brassica patch and the legume/cucurbit patch which currently only has broad beans and a row of peas on the go along with some salads. The runner bean poles are up in readiness but the runner beans are only now germinating back at home.
Broad beans (under netting)
For the sake of completeness here is the last section with strawberries and blueberries to the left, rhubarb to the right and asparagus bed featured in my last post in the middle.
So there you have it. Together with the seedling nursery at home this is my vegetable home! Hope you enjoyed the tour.
Here is the current state of play in my warts and all circuit of the plot:
Rhubarb is at one end (together with a globe artichoke). The bare patch before the blueberry pen and strawberries is my aspiring asparagus patch.
...beyond which is the potato patch...
...then peas and beans (with their scrap heap supports) ...
...climbing beans and cucurbits (currently finding their feet under netting). The cages are protecting celeriac. ...
Beyond that is currently a sight for sore eyes - soon to house sweetcorn and my brassica patch.
That takes you from end to end on one side. Heading back along the other side in the reverse direction you start with the fruit cage. This is three bays (Berries/Raspberries/Strawberries)...
...but the last (former strawberry bay) now has been given over to new salad sowings...
We are big on carrots - but so is the carrot root fly so they have to be covered .
Bringing up the rear are the alliums. Onions to the left, garlic and elephant garlic to the right.
At -6 C it has been the coldest night so far and I am reluctantly accepting that we have moved straight on to winter mode.
One autumnal novelty that has worked a treat this year is Endive Pancalieri. It tolerates cold and thrives just as all the usual lettuces are grinding to a halt.
It looks like a loose leaf lettuce but has serrated leaves rather than the rounded oakleaf we are used to, and is sold by the supermarkets in bags as 'Frisee'. Although the leaves are green they are best blanched in order to minimise the bitterness that can develop as the temperature drops. Here is the result of my experimentation:
The crisp and sweet blanched stems are encouraged by holding the rosette up with a loop of string. In the row of three below the middle plant can be seen before and after tying up.
Before
After
The loop can be lowered for harvesting and then pulled back up again if the whole plant is not being harvested at once. Meantime the next rosette can be tied in readiness for harvesting in a week or two.They are quite voluminous and the stems seem to cluster in groups even though I am sure each rosette is just one plant.
As these are across town at the allotment I am not sure they have survived the current frost, but so fare they have been a roaring success and I will be growing them in future years so as to extend the salad season into the colder months.
p.s. Endive is a member of the chicory family. I am also growing some chicory proper to be dug up and then forced for 'chicons' still later in the growing year. Watch this space!
Here's a nightmare picture. It is my potato patch after the chop. The blight must have blown through our allotment site last week and the only thing to do was to chop off the haulms in a belated attempt to stop the spores descending into the soil and damaging the tubors.
20th August
My haste meant that I neglected to take a picture before. Here is the latest picture I can find of the potato patch, taken on 26th June.(July was busy)
26th June
There's no practical precaution that I know of for blight, aside from isolation from other potato plants. That's not practical on an allotment site.
At least for carrots the dastardly root fly can be kept out using a barrier method:
Environmesh protected carrots.
Thank goodness some crops are able to flourish out in the open without protection: Here's a current shot of the salad bed:
Also thriving on in the warm and wet conditions: squashes and sweetcorn.
I also had a nice surprise to discover a bumper crop of blackberries was ready for picking.
I will be leaving the potatoes for storage underground for a week or two in the hope that any blight spores not removed with the leaves will dissipate out in the open. Hopefully the emergency measures will have saved the crop.
This is one of four plants in the school garden. I am surprised that it doing so well. Last autumn an overenthusiastic child mistook it for a weed and uprooted it. It was quite adolescent at about 18 inches high but I decided to retrieve it from the compost heap and plant it again: brassicas are transplanted when very young so why not give it a try. All the same I am gobsmacked that this has done best of all out of four specimens.
Some other overwinterers are also thriving in the balmy conditions
Winter Purslane
Land Cress
There is some less voluminous lambs lettuce in there too.
And bouncing back, after looking very bedraggled over the winter months
Today, at the school garden, I lifted the fleece on the salad bed:
This is where the peas and beans grew this year, but then we planted out plug plants at the beginning of September. The fleece was deployed in the middle of October just before the first frost arrived.
In the foreground the Mizuna is looking nice and frilly. At the other end the Land Cress or American Cress is thriving :
Land Cress
This provides a peppery aftertaste. When the children were sampling the salads last week I warned them off this, and didn't provide any tasting samples for them. The result was that it became the highlight of the session with, I think, every child trying it just to prove me wrong, or to prove they weren't wimps!
There were four sorts of lettuce, with the Marveille de Quatre Saisons stealing the show with its rouged leaves.
Lettuces
The most prolific salad has been Winter Purslane (Claytonia, Miners' Lettuce). Still mild despite starting to flower.
Winter Purslane
I've tucked them all up again under the fleece and it is going to be interesting to see how they do when winter bites. I will leave them to see if we get a new flush come spring. As this is going to be the brassica bed next year there is no rush to clear the ground.
Just while I am on the subject of summer crops I can't resist showing of the solitary chilli from last year. It was an unsuccessful experiment for me spanning some four varieties. I did learn that they really do need to be treated as indoor plants in Scotland. The unheated greenhouse was ok for tomatoes and cucumber but the chillis just refused to grow. Add to this my over enthusiastic watering (in a vain attempt to encourage growth) and you can understand why they protested. It was only when I brought them back indoors that this one fruit eventually ripened.
As you see the leaves are protesting about the cold nights. Despite all this I will try again next year, in a limited indoor windowsill way, to grow chillies.
Well lots of them really. The picture shows an unpacked delivery of plug plants received by the School on Tuesday from Rocket Gardens based in Cornwall. Today they were planted out into the garden beds by the children under the supervision of the Garden Team. Every space freed up after summer harvesting has been filled with Lettuce( 4 varieties) Corn Salad (Lamb's Lettuce), Winter Purslane, Spring Onions, Cabbages (2 varieties), Kale (3), Pak Choi, Mizuna, Broccoli, Turnip, Mustard and Perpetual Spinach. Custody is now down to us - and the vagaries of a Scottish winter!
I was impressed with the previous May delivery too. It included courgette plants. Despite the change in latitude they took off after being planted out and produced fruit before the summer holiday (end of June in Scotland). Despite a dose of powdery mildew they are still producing large fruit now! The School obtained the plants for free as an award under the RHS Gardening for Schools Scheme, but I have to say that the plant quality and service has been most impressive. It would be invaluable for anyone stealing a march or playing catch up after falling behind on their sowing schedule.
Clearing the decks for spring I have to record that the cut and come again trays in the greenhouse and on the kitchen windowsill failed to deliver. They stalled at the microgreen size and proceeded no further. Whether it was cold, lack of nutrition or lack of sunlight is academic. The yield did not justify the effort
Another failure has been my attempt to overwinter broad beans at the plot. I thought my fleece tent would shelter them.
Maybe it did help, but some agency has still uprooted any plants that survived into the new year:
Move on please - Nothing to see here
A combination of frost action and mice I would guess. On the plus side my Malwina strawberries delivered to late for planting out look quite happy in their temporary greenhouse residence
Also getting greenhouse space are these violas
Holding on for spring is this bedraggled parsley plant
On the plus side too is the clamped carrots
Despite my best efforts we are only three quarters of the way through the crop. BTW I have added carrot cake to my limited baking repertoire.
One more admission. The pigeons discovered the purple sprouting broccoli was get attable through the net, and get at this one they did.
Skeletalised PSB
Fortunately one robust plant is taller than all the others and so they couldn't get at the shorter ones. Talk about taking one for the team!
