Lettuce: 40-90 days. From seed in April and every two weeks thereafter until mid May. Start a fall crop in mid-late August. Plant 1″ apart and harvest every other immature plant for microgreens. Finish with plants 6″-8″ apart. Or simply designate an area, sprinkle seeds evenly and use a rake to integrate seed into soil. Few vegetables vary as much as lettuce. From the almost inedible iceberg to the tiny butter crunch to a delicious red romaine, lettuce’s looks, tastes and textures are all over the map. It thrives in cool weather.
Archive for the ‘Avant Gardening Series’ Category
Guide to Avant Gardening: Part 7 ~ More Cool-Weather Vegetables
Friday, May 8th, 2009Guide to Avant Gardening: Part 6 ~ More Cool-Weather Vegetables
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Cabbage: 60-180 days. Grown from seed or starts. Cultivation is similar to broccoli. Plant 12″-18″ apart. Heavy rains may cause heads to crack, especially in late summer. Growing a large cabbage insures that you’re going to be eating cabbage for a long, long time. It’s better to harvest the head when it’s the size of softball by pressing the leaves down, cutting the head free but carefully leaving the stalk and leaves intact. Anywhere from 2 to 6 mini-cabbage heads will grow from the edges of the stump, which can be harvested as needed. In terms of dollar value per acre, cabbage brings financial returns second only to marijuana. Try growing savoy varieties, which have delightfully crinkled leaves and tight heads. Or plant a variety called January King-it features gloriously colored leaves, green with red veins, all flecked with white.
Guide to Avant Gardening: Part 5 ~ Cool-Weather Vegetables
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009Cool Weather Vegetables-March 1 to April 15
Asparagus: Grown from roots planted 18″ apart. Won’t reliably produce spears until the third year, but can produce for twenty years or more. Asparagus plants take up a lot of room in a garden and may better suited for your perennial beds. The ferny plant makes a great accent to rose bushes and other tall perennials. To plant, dig a trench 15 inches deep and line with two inches of manure and compost, topped with an inch of topsoil. Lay the root, crown side up, and cover with two inches of soil. As the plant grows, backfill with soil until level with the rest of the garden. For the first three years do not harvest spears. First up will be male spears, about as thick as you index finger. Later in the season will come the female spears, the diameter of your little finger. Never pick the female spears. All-male cultivars have been developed. One good old-time variety is Jersey Giant. There’s also a purple variety, which reverts to green when cooked. Europeans also heavily mulch asparagus, to blanch it, producing white spears.
Beets: 50-80 days. Grown from seed, planted as soon as the soil can be worked. Sow seeds 2″ apart, thin to 6″ by eating the smaller, slower plants fresh or boiled. Harvest when roots reach 2″ diameter. Repeat sowing every two weeks for summer-long harvest. Of the many varieties, golden beets are among the tastiest.
Broccoli: 55 to 100 days. Grown from seeds or starts. Plant 18″-24″ apart. Can be planted as soon as ground can be worked and again in late summer. Heat is the great enemy of broccoli, causing the heads to bolt-turning from a tight green head to a cluster of flowers. Some types are grown for heads and, once harvested, side shoots. Some are grown for side shoots alone. Broccoli raab is a member of another plant family, can tolerate more heat, has a sharp, distinct flavor and is usually sautéed. Plants grown from seed offer some advantages. They tend to have better root systems and can tolerate heat waves and water shortages better. The two most common problems are aphids and cabbage loopers. Aphids can be hosed off followed by an insecticidal soap spray. Cabbage loopers-small green caterpillars-can devour leaves but can be treated with the bacterial powder Bt. Just for fun try growing Romanesco broccoli, which looks like a plant designed by M.C. Escher. The head is a cluster of tiny, spiraling minarets, it’s flavor somewhere between broccoli and cauliflower.
Brussels Sprouts
80-90 days. Grown from seeds or starts. Plant12″-18″ apart. Care is much the same a broccoli. Sprouts form from the bottom up and harvests can last up to 8 weeks, if you pinch the topmost growth the sprouts will develop all at once. Tolerates heat better then broccoli.
To read all of Todd’s Avant Gardening posts, see the Avant Gardening Series category.
Guide to Avant Gardening: Part 4 ~ Starting Your Garden
Friday, May 1st, 2009Pick a well-drained site, preferably with sunlight for 8 hours or more per day. If the site is covered with grass use a shovel to peel back the lawn to a depth of 4-6 inches. Bang the clumps of turf together to loosen up soil trapped by the roots. Compost the clumps of turf.
Using a long-handled spade, turn the soil over in big clumps and let dry for a week or more. Never work the soil when it is wet, because any clay in the soil will turn your soil into clods that will take years to break down.
Determine which additives-typically manure and/or compost-will best help your soil. Apply these additives to a thickness of up to 4 inches on top of the soil you’ve broken up earlier. Use a rototiller to churn the soil and amendments together running once, say, east to west and again north to south.
Guide to Avant Gardening: Part 3 ~ The Expectations
Monday, April 27th, 2009As a gardener you should expect great things. And you should expect some setbacks. Any seasoned gardener will tell you that not a season goes by without successes and setbacks. Celebrate your victories. Don’t take your failures personally.
And despite what some books may promise, gardening is hard work, especially in the beginning. But as your knowledge grows, so will your harvests. Have faith. Work hard.
Guide to Avant Gardening: Part 1
Friday, April 24th, 2009
When thinking about plants, it’s important to remember that life on our planet wouldn’t exist without them. By taking seemingly intangible elements from the air, ground and water, and combining them with sunlight-plants perform everyday miracles upon which our survival depends.
Think about it, plants germinate, grow, reproduce and respond to their environment in the same basic ways we do. But they do it without a brain or central nervous system, without muscles or a skeletal system, without any apparent premeditation. Which, as one British horticulturist noted, should give some of our more smug vegetarian friends pause. Plants utilize the fourth dimension– time-in ways unknown to us.
Plants are a 200 million year-old experiment that continues to this day. As Michael Pollan pointed out in his excellent book The Botany of Desire, plants are using us to their ends at least as much as we use them to ours.
Guide to Avant Gardening: Part 2
Friday, April 24th, 2009To read the first part of this post, click here.
Only once people realized, some 4,000 years ago, that they could harvest seeds and plant them, did civilization begin. Hunter-gatherers became agriculturalists, camps became cities, and social, military and economic strata arose. Early farmers were selecting for plants and animals that were bigger, tastier, stronger and faster growing. In the Middle East wheat proved to be the grain of choice. Halfway across the world in ancient Mexico corn began development. And in the Far East rice cultivation arose. Crops were selected for specific qualities suited to a specific area. These crops-known to some as “landraces”-fostered a genetic diversity.
With the advent of modern agriculture, this diversity shrank to the vanishing point. The Green Revolution of the 1950’s stressed, among other dubious ideas, genetic conformity and monocultural farming practices.
This in turn meant that many of the staples of our existence-wheat, corn, rice potatoes, bananas-had very little genetic depth and a very high chance of failure should a pest or disease get a foothold.
At the same time Robert Rodale was starting a revolution of his own in Pennsylvania. He was the father of modern organic gardening, which stressed building the soil and discarding the many poisonous chemicals associated with modern farming.
His methods stressed sustainability and the incorporation of natural methods of fighting off pests and diseases.
Since the first publishing of his book in 1947, organic gardening has become gospel among health-conscious gardeners, for good and occasionally ill.
