Growing Salad Greens From Seed

Of all the edibles I grow from seed in the vegetable garden, I find salad greens to be the easiest and most rewarding.  Sprinkle seeds on top of good soil then water.  There's no need to cover the seeds with dirt.  They'll sprout in around 3 days and can be harvested in about 3 weeks.

If you've never grown lettuce before, I would recommend buying any pack of mesclun salad mix that looks interesting and give it a try.  Don't worry about sowing the seeds too thick.  Once the leaves are large enough to harvest, cut them at the base of the plant, and within a few days you'll notice the open spaces filled with new leaves.  Salad greens can be grown in pots, raised beds or directly in the ground and by growing them from seed yourself, you will have access to wonderful varieties you would never find at the grocery store.  One of my favorites is Romaine Freckles from Botanical Interests.

I harvested the first salad greens for dinner tonight.  This is Tango from Johnny's that overwintered (shocking!) and a few leaves of Sea of Red from Renee's.  It's hard to articulate the excitement of the first dinner salad of the season eaten 30 minutes after harvest. Bliss!

Coveting "The Good Life"

I was reading one of my favorite garden blogs (In the Garden Online) this morning where Colleen was lamenting about how she's so ahead of the game that she's able to just sit back and wait to start gathering food from her garden. While I read her list I realized that it mirrors the same list of things I've been agonizing over.

1. This Spirea (pictured right) has the most beautiful little white blooms with a tiny yellow center. I'm likely getting rid of it in a couple of weeks and every day I've stared at it it from my kitchen window thinking I should cut some of the flowers to bring inside. Haven't done it!
2. I've had these lettuce and mustard green plants (pictured below ) in these little cups where they were grown from seed for several weeks waiting to be planted.
3. Mint tea - I'm scared to grow mint on the count of I planted one little ole mint plant years ago at a house I was renting from my grandmother and it took over. To this day when you walk in the back door of that old house, the smell of mint is intoxicating. No-thank-you to invasives!
4. When I step outside I see no thriving eco-system. I just see all the un-done work. The "eco-system" is hanging out in my neighbor's yard (she's a teacher and off for the summer and way ahead of me on gardening) waiting for me to get my act together.
5. My plots are not planted. In fact, my plots are not even built yet! I've got one table full of veggies waiting and a million empty pots that need to be planted. (The sky is falling - the sky is falling!)

This year's garden has really taken a backseat to the other stuff in my personal life. Between the weddings and swine flu's and budget's and community garden fundraising... I either need a time machine, or a bunch of spare gardeners or I may not get to see my kitchen window lined with tomatoes this summer.

Are you on schedule? God knows I hope I'm not the only one...

Potted Lettuce

This is going to be my new patio table centerpiece. It will soon be filled with lettuce from the seeds that I sowed in a shallow terracotta pot I had sitting in the basement. The patio table is white and I think the contrast of the terracotta pot and the mix of lettuce leaves is gonna be great!

Anybody else have an interesting edible centerpiece?

Lettuce Update

I'm not sure what to make of this but the top planter box where I planted the lettuce seed is doing way better than the bottom one. Here's the top box. Most of it is filled with the European Musclean mix. The stuff in the very front is Black Seeded Simpson. I don't really know what it's suppose to look like but compared to the bottom one, this is rockin.Now here's the bottom one. What the hell happened here??? This was suppose to be the Rocky Top Musclean mix on the left and the Black Seeded Simpson on the right. I know you can't see it very well but it got really tall and then just fell over and started looking rotten. I think I'll just dig all this out and hope the top one works out.
In other veggie news, the broccoli is getting enormous! I have no clue what to do with it. I know I planted it at the wrong season but now it's getting to be the right season, so will it grow now? Or is it just gonna get bigger and bigger but with no heads of broccoli?

Edit: Thank goodness I keep this blog! It seems that the top is actually the Rocky Top mix.

Swimming Lettuce And Horizontal Zinnia

Since I started gardening I've noticed that lots of things seem to move in slow motion. All summer I've watched my plants like a hawk noticing every little change in my garden plants but the slow growth makes everything seemmmmmssss likeeeeee itssss movingggg innn slowwwww moooootionnnnn. I know...."a watched pot" blah blah blah.

This past weekend it seemed like it rained for 40 days and 40 nights but it was actually only a couple of days.
As you may remember, there was water actually standing in my homemade cedar planter boxes that I had freshly planted with 3 different kinds of lettuce seeds. I just knew my lettuce was a goner, but look look! Man this stuff is growing like crazy after I removed the Bulls umbrella and exposed it to a few hours of sun. I was told by the CSA guy that I'd be eating fresh salad greens in 3 weeks and I did not believe him but after seeing this extreme growth I think he might be right!
I've noticed that my Zinna gets so tall that it kind of falls over. Take a look at the picture below. See how the pretty pink Zinnia looks like it's laying down? I love that! It's probably not so great for the plant but I think it's very cool looking. Does your Zinna lay down?

Dear Seed Saving Experts, HELP!

This is my Coreopsis - is that a seed pod in this picture? There are lots of these on the plant but I have no clue what I'm looking at here.

Here is the big Rudbeckia - I'm pretty darn sure that this is where the seeds are on this one so I'll be looking on the internet to try to find out how to harvest the seeds. If you know, please share!Here's the purple Coneflower. This looks odd to me, more like it's just dead. How do I know if there are seeds here?
Speaking of seeds, below is my attempt to protect my freshly planted lettuce seeds. Within 1 hour of planting them it started raining, and raining, and raining. At some point I looked out the back door and there was water standing in the planter boxes, so I drug this freebie umbrella out of the basement. I have no clue if flooding them will keep them from germinating but I'll be watching them closely over the next few days. Go Bulls!

Planting Lettuce: Day Zero

I planted the lettuce seeds today! I started by drilling drain holes in the new planter boxes I made last weekend and covering the holes with screen. I added bagged top soil and bagged compost to the boxes then sprinkled seeds over the top and then sprinkled a very thin layer of potting soil over the top and watered it.

The bottom box has European Mesclun Salad on the left and Henderson's Black-Seeded Simpson on the right. The top box has Rocky Top Lettuce Salad in most of the box but I also added a little more of the Black-Seeded Simpson at the very front. I have no idea what I'm doing here! The rest of the seeds go to GB.

Ummmm - what happened to the broccoli??? I'm guessing this is why it isn't suppose to be planted in the summer? What do I do now? Throw it out? Will this keep growing since it should be cooling off soon or is it a goner? This is one of the baby rabbits that didn't get chopped up in the unfortunate lawn mower killing. If you look closely you can see another one in the hole right beside it. I saw another one over by my roses earlier. They are so tiny.

Seeds And Stuff...

I received my lettuce seeds today!

I ordered these seeds after reading Farmgirl's detailed instruction about growing lettuce from seed. I was so impressed I ordered them straight off the website that she orders from. I'll be planting them sometime in in the next month or so in the soon to be built planter boxes. The nice people at the seed store also sent me a free pack of Common Thyme. Thanks nice seed store people!

Here's my dwarf snapdragon that I bought a while back. It's another plant that started blooming after I added the woodchip mulch. Notice the bastard weed in the background. I hate that stuff!

In other gardening news I finally cut the scary cracked Big Boy tomatoes. Mom (and everybody else) was right! They were not all gross inside at all! I had a couple of slices on my veggie burger and it was AWESOME! Guess who's having a tomato sandwich for lunch tomorrow??

I have another busy weekend planned. Here's what I'm hoping to get done.

1. Paint awesome freecycle table and chairs (I finished de-rusting it. YAY)
2. Deadhead 26 hedge roses AGAIN. These things are blooming like crazy!
3. Dig up evil purslane
4. Spray more skinny weedkiller on bastard weeds
5. Return ugly plastic planter boxes
6. Scrape paint off old window and find place to hang. I think I want to get rid of the glass in this thing and use it as a trellis for a climbing rose
7. Turn compost in homemade composter
8. Divide Iris