Your Small Kitchen Garden |

The weather in 2009 has confused many a small kitchen garden. Mine (hardiness zone 5b/6a in Central Pennsylvania) has been particularly confused. In Your Home Kitchen Garden, I wrote a post about the awkward transition of my garden from spring crops of peas, lettuce, and spinach to my summer crop of winter squash. As well, I’ve joked quite a bit with gardening friends about weird stuff the weather has wrought.

For example, I’ve stated repeatedly that unusual amounts of rain have given some of my tomato and squash plants trench foot. Trench foot is a very uncomfortable deterioration of the skin of your feet. You get trench foot by standing for extended periods in water – usually cold water. Of course my plants don’t have trench foot, but if there’s a horticultural equivalent of trench foot, my plants have it.

Did my lettuce bolt in June’s heat only to unbolt in July’s unseasonable cold? I suppose not, but the head made an amusing conversation piece, and a terrific salad.

Hot, Cold, Hot, Cold, Hot

About when I started planting back in March, we had unseasonable heat; I was concerned that spring crops would dry out, and I was hopeful of planting summer crops early. The heat lasted only a week, and then it became brisk. April was never warm… and May also was cool; we had frost in late May!

All this cold made my spring crops stall; they did almost nothing until late May. Then, when the days finally warmed, things grew very quickly. We had terrific lettuce salads for four weeks before the plants started to bolt. In late June I had all but given up on the lettuce.

Lo, the temperature dropped! Yes, July nights got very cool—some even in the low 40s. Lettuce thrives in cool weather, and mine started to look more and more edible. I started joking that my lettuce plants were unbolting… and my gardening friends made offhanded remarks.

Lettuce Bolts in Summer Heat

Daytime heat for the past four days has been above 80F degrees. It seems crazy, but the lettuce that spent most of July unbolting is showing signs of re-bolting. So, today, for the first time in my life, I harvested a crisp, delicious head of Ithaca lettuce. In August!

Information about lettuce that’s actually useful to a kitchen gardener:

• Good Lettuce Gone Bad: Bolting and Flowering | Vegetable Gardening … – Thank you – I did a search to find out why I had some bolting lettuce in my garden so soon, and this helped me to understand WHY the plant does what it does. In this case I think it probably had to do with a recent temperature rise …

• bolting lettuce – i think bolting lettuce looks funny. this is a romain (or cos) variety, and you can see the flower stalk alone is about twice the size of the head of lettuce itself. i’m growing this on my roof this year to save seeds. …

• Transplanting Lettuce – I have taken most of the bolting lettuce out and now I have some extra cups. Some of the bolting lettuce I am leaving in so I can see if I can get some seeds. I am not sure how successful I will be with seed collecting. …

Technorati Tags: lettuce, plant lettuce, weather

The earliest lettuce sprouts in my small kitchen garden are no bigger than pebbles in the soil. Cracks in the soil indicate high clay content; clay cracks as it dries out.

I planted lettuce and spinach in my small kitchen garden nearly seven weeks ago. These are crops you can plant outdoors as soon as the soil thaws. I argue that there’s no hurry: cold weather crops will survive a heavy frost, but they won’t grow much if the temperature remains low. So, I tend to wait a few weeks after the thaw before I plant any cold weather crops.

On the other hand, if you wait too long, some cold-weather crops may not produce to their greatest potential before summer heat shuts them down. Pea plants, for example, wilt and die when cooked by summer heat. Lettuce and spinach grow slowly when nights are cool and days are warm, but when nights are warm and days are hot, these greens “bolt” meaning they send up stalks of flowers in a rush to make seeds before the heat becomes unbearable.

Don’t Wait to Plant Lettuce

A handful of lettuce seeds hardly resembles the food I begin to harvest about a month after planting. I’m always a bit awed that so much grows from such tiny packages.

If you’re in hardiness zone six or five, it’s not too late to enjoy a lettuce or spinach crop. It takes about 40 days from the day you plant seeds till it’s reasonable to harvest young plants—or leaves from them. If you plant now (the end of May), lettuce and spinach will grow quickly, though it’ll probably hit the wall in July.

Whether I plant lettuce early or late, I use a simple method that forces me to harvest young plants aggressively: I plant many seeds very close together—ideally about 3-5 seeds per square inch. Here’s the procedure:

1. Prepare soil according to the method that best fits your situation. The box, Before You Plant Lettuce provides links to posts that explain various methods of preparing soil. When you’ve created a six- to eight-inch-wide furrow in which to plant, you’re ready for step 2 below.

2. Read the planting instructions on the package holding your lettuce seeds. Chances are, they call for a planting depth of ¼ inch. Depending on the variety of lettuce, the instructions also may include thinning guidelines such as Thin to 12” between plants. Ultimately, you plants will need to be approximately this far apart or they won’t have space to mature. But I encourage you to start them much closer.

3. Pinch a bunch of lettuce seeds between you thumb and index finger, and sprinkle them around in the furrow as you’d sprinkle seasoning into a frying pan of cooking food. I think of this as seasoning the soil with seeds. You’re trying to deliver from two to five seeds on every square inch of soil in you furrow. As your pinch of seeds runs out, take another pinch and sprinkle areas that you missed with the first pinch. Repeat this until you’re confident there are seeds spread the full length and width of the row.

4. Cover the seeds with ¼ inch of soil. I usually pick up lumps of soil from the edges of the furrow and crumble them into the furrow. If there aren’t appropriate lumps, I sprinkle hands full of loose soil onto the seeds. Were I planting dozens of feet of rows, I’d rake soil onto the seeds, but it only takes a few minutes to cover a 14 foot row with hand-sprinkled soil.

I planted three three-foot sections of lettuce. The first holds a salad mix with four types of leaf lettuce. The second holds Ithaca head lettuce, a flavorful lettuce that forms crisp, small heads. The third holds Romaine lettuce. This is the first time I’ve grown Romaine. While the plants in these photos are already crowded, they aren’t yet big enough to fill a salad bowl simply by thinning.

5. Gently pat down the soil in the furrow. I press lightly with my fingers and the palm of my hand. This encourages soil to stay in place when it rains and when I hand-water the newly-planted seeds.

6. Water deeply and then water daily until the plants emerge. Then water if the soil looks dry or if the plants look wilted.

Crowding in Your Small Kitchen Garden

Your lettuce plants will be very crowded, but resist the urge to thin them until they produce leaves big enough to eat. This may take a few weeks, but then watch you’re your crowded plants may grow so fast that it become hard to keep up with them.

I take my first harvest from the middle of the furrow. I work my hand among the plants and grasp several at once right against the soil. I gently pull them from the ground, leaving a small gap in the lettuce patch. Ideally, I work the entire row for a single meal. If there’s simply more lettuce than we can consume, and the plants are pressed tightly together, I may pull many small plants and toss them on the mulch or compost pile; it’s important to keep air spaces among the remaining plants or they’ll hold moisture between them leading to possible problems with slugs, snails, insects, and even rot.

When my crowded lettuce plants are 3- to 4-inches tall, I work my hand into the mass of plants and pull several up along with their roots. I twist the roots off and toss them away, but the young, tender leaves go into the evening’s salad. I like to thin starting in the middle of the row. Ultimately, only five or six plants may mature, and thinning is necessary to provide space for them to grow.

As I harvest over the course of two or three weeks, I take plants always from the densest sections of the row. As lettuce matures in two months, I thin at a pace that I estimate will provide the requisite spacing about six weeks after planting.

For leaf lettuce, when you’ve thinned enough that the plants don’t crowd each other, change your harvesting technique: now use scissors to cut leaves from the plants an inch or two above the soil. More leaves should grow on the cut plants.

For head lettuce, continue to harvest entire plants as-needed. As heads approach maturity, you’ll need fewer of them to make a meal, and a head you harvest near the end of the season may last for several meals.

Here’s a video I made that demonstrates both how I plant lettuce and how I thin and harvest to make room for some plants. It’s about 6 and a half minutes long. Please enjoy:

Technorati Tags: crowding, lettuce, plant lettuce, thinning

I just returned from a visit with neighbors whose activity completely fails the criteria for a small kitchen garden: He tills a plot that is 11 yards across, and 33 yards long. He starts spring crops early, plants summer crops in their place as they expire, and goes back for another round of spring crops as summer draws to a close. She spends hours a day from late spring to early fall processing food into jars and freezer packs. In fact, as I approached this morning, they both were shucking their last ears of sweet corn—clearly enough to can or freeze.

We chatted before I began a photo shoot in their garden (click the lead photo in this post to see all the photos on flickr.com), and a chipmunk snuck under the table and tried to grab a kernel of corn from her sandal… it startled us, and we startled it with our reactions.

My neighbor’s garden is extremely traditional. They’ve lived in their house for fifty years, and simply carved a garden plot out of the yard (it’s a very big yard). There’s no transition from yard-to-garden… except that the grass ends and then there’s exposed soil. The garden is large, so you need to walk in it to reach the plants, and the rows are close together.

At the near end of the garden, I found long-necked squash weaving among tall sweet corn stalks. Sunflowers defined the garden’s edge, though they’d faded: their heads dry and drooping ground-ward. There were rows of tomato plants hugging the ground, and other rows of tomatoes staked and upright. Beefsteaks and Italian tomatoes—the first for salads and sauces, the second specifically for sauces.

There were huge cabbages, a row of green beans, another of wax beans, and a third of lima beans. The cucumber plants were spent, but tucked next to them was a pocket of young lettuce and flowering bean plants—recent planting. Interestingly, the cucumber plants were withering where peas had grown in the spring. There was a partial row of pretty green-and-purple-leafed plants I mistook for turnips, but it turned out they were beets.

I believe she mentioned that she has already put up 50 pints of tomato sauce, but it was clear there’s another ten pints of sauce on the plants. They didn’t have much luck with beans this year as they rely only on rain for water, and it has been dry. Still, the recent rains have revitalized things, and it looks as though some bean-picking will soon be in order.

All this as the season is winding down. Still, in our hardiness zone 5b, we might not see killing frost until mid October. A lot of new beans can grow in 30 days, and you could even get some decent young lettuce if you started from seed now.

My neighbors have peach and apple trees in their yard. The peaches are all harvested, and the apples will provide enough for the season without creating pressure to preserve them. A small grape trellis holds an awesome crop of what look like concord grapes—I should have asked while I was there, or tasted one. I also failed to ask how they use the grapes, but she did comment that the grapes would be the last of the big chores before the garden is done for the season. My mom used to can a mixture of grapes, sugar, and water; we’d drink the liquid from these jars and toss the grapes. This juice absolutely rocked compared to commercial grape juice.

My neighbor’s compost heap stands about five feet deep, and must be at least 12 feet on a side. No doubt there is a thick layer of rich mulch at the bottom. As he uses no chemical preparations, he must move a lot of compost to till into the garden each year.

Yes, it’s a large kitchen garden, but even with all that space, they get more production by staging crops according to the seasons. This is an important technique especially for the owner of a small kitchen garden who wants to get the most from little space.

Technorati Tags: asparagus, beans, beets, cabbage, corn, garden, grapes, lettuce, squash, tomatoes, vegetables