Moxie Gardener

Spring lettuce almost ready to harvest.

There’s nothing like fresh, crisp, delicious, spring salad greens picked from your own urban garden.

Nothing.

Even if you buy your greens fresh from the farmer’s market, they’ll never be as fresh and sweet as the ones you pick from your own garden and have for dinner that night.

I say “that night” because you must pick salad greens on the day you plan to eat them, in the early morning before the sun climbs very high into the sky. They’ll be at their most succulent then, with drops of dew clinging to their leaves and to your fingers.

The lettuce mixture in the photo above is just about ready to pick. I’ll give them a few more days, especially since rain is forecast tomorrow. Lettuce is mostly water; water equals quick, succulent growth.

I have an unusual method for picking lettuce. Sometimes I go down the row with a scissors and cut off a cross-section of the mesclun or lettuce mix, leaving the roots to grow another crop of leaves.

Other times, I pick the largest plants in the patch of intensively planted salad greens. I immediately snip off the roots with a regular pair of scissors (this helps keep soil off the greens).

A week or so later, the smaller plants that I left in the garden have grown larger. I again go through the patch, picking the largest plants and snipping off the roots right then and there. Each time I thin out the larger plants, I leave the smaller ones.

They are at their most delicious when they’re about four to five inches high. Pick them then and leave all of the smaller ones to continue growing.

This effectively extends my lettuce harvest. Here’s my theory on why this works: lettuce has a tendency to get bitter and “bolt” or “go to seed” when hot summer weather sets in. The larger the plant, the greater the chance of this happening. But if you pick the larger plants, you’re left with the smaller ones, which put their energy into growing and have less of a tendency to turn bitter.

At least that’s what I’ve experienced.

Have you ever tried extending your lettuce harvest by picking the largest plants and leaving the smaller ones to continue growing?

Mizuna greens are delicious, easy to grow, and can replace spinach in virtually any recipe.

Have you tried any of the many Asian greens that have been appearing in seed catalogs for the past few years?

My introduction to Asian greens came from mizuna greens in a mesclun mix.  Mizuna greens are a mild mustard green with deeply serrated, lance-like leaves.  The young, tender leaves are good in a salad mix (hence their inclusion in mesclun).  The mature leaves are delicious virtually any way you cook spinach.

Last year I added a purple variety of mizuna greens to my garden.  Delicious.

Johnny’s Selected Seeds, http://www.johnnyseeds.com has the best selection of Asian greens, or any greens for that matter.  Their 2009 catalog devotes twenty-four pages to greens of all types, including Asian greens, specialty greens, lettuce, salad mixes, and mesclun.  Another thing I like about Johnny’s Selected Seeds is they include pictures of the individual leaves of most of their greens for easy identification in the garden.

Some Asian greens on my “want” list for this year include:

• Hon Tsai Tai (Brassica rapa) A “flower-bud” type of Asian green.  Hon tsai tai has purple flower stems and buds and a pleasing mustard taste that’s good in salads, or lightly cooked in stir-fries or soups.  Best sown from June through October for harvest from mid-summer on.
• Green Lance (Brassica oleracea) An F1 hybid, Green Lance is another flower-bud green.  Delicious cooked like broccoli or stir-fried.  Once the main stem is cut, this plant will branch out for many more harvests.  Also called Gai Lohn and Pak Kah Nah.
• Hong Vit (Raphanus sativus) A pink-stemmed leaf radish with a mild radish flavor.  Does not produce “radishes.”  Harvest leaves at any size.  Young, small leaves are an excellent addition to salads, larger more mature leaves are good for stir-fries or soups.
• Red Komatsuna (Brassica rapa) Red Komatsuna is an F1 hybrid leaf “green.”  Its red leaves with green stems are a stunning addition to your salad bowl.  More intense red color if sown in summer for fall harvest.
• Vitamin Green (Brassica rapa [Narinosa group]) If sown thickly, this deliciously different green will produce small leaves for salads.  Mature leaves can be harvested for braising or stir-frying.  Plants are slow to bolt and tolerant to both cold and heat.  Will produce a second harvest.

I could go on and on, but I only have so much space in the garden.  Will you be trying any Asian greens in your garden this year?

Summer is winding down and it’s time to start seeds for fall lettuce and mesclun mixes.  My lettuce, spinach, and mesclun mixes planted in April and May have long since turned bitter in the heat of summer.

I like to start my fall lettuce and other salad greens in the house under lights.  It is possible to grow seedlings outdoors in a cold frame or in a shady corner, but the heat of late summer dries out the small pots rather quickly.  This can spell the end of young seedlings.  Keeping them inside mitigates this somewhat, even in a house without air conditioning.

Grow the seedlings inside for only a couple weeks before moving them outside to harden off in the shade for a week before planting.  Just make sure to check them morning and evening so they don’t dry out.  This is easy to fit into your schedule for only a week.  Plant in the ground three weeks after they germinate.  Your three week old plants will take off and mature in the cool fall weather.

In my Minnesota garden I plant mesclun in fall.  I put four seeds in each pot and I don’t thin.  Each pot gets planted as a unit and I don’t space between the units.  Here there isn’t enough time before frost for the plants to fully mature.  As they grow I pick every other plant.  The plants left in the ground continue to grow and I pick every other one again.  The remaining plants grow even larger and by that time frost is threatening.

When I pull the last of the fall-sown mesclun, I sow some spinach seeds to overwinter for an early crop the following spring.  Of course, first I work in some compost and make sure to plant a different crop after I harvest the spinach in spring.

With a little advance planning you can be harvesting fresh salad greens until frost.