What’s happening in the garden this week: Aug. 18-24
Lettuce out, lettuce in ... and other plantings for the next season
Fall spinach
I love spinach and fall is a great time to grow it. Spinach grows best in cooler weather and when the air is less humid. This week I planted about 30 seedlings started in soil blocks indoors earlier in the month. I put them in the garden about two weeks after sowing them, which admittedly is fast, but they all had at least one set of true leaves and looked robust. Equally important, we’re in the midst of a cool spell, with temperatures topping out in the mid-70, so they’ll have a good chance to establish themselves before more summer-like temperatures return, as I’m sure they will. I put the spinach in a bed where bush beans had been growing until a few days ago. After pulling the spent bean plants out, I spread compost on top of the bed and popped the spinach in.
Daikon radishes
I’ve never grown Daikon radishes before and while I knew the radishes themselves can grow quite large (3-4 inches long, an inch or more in diameter) I didn’t fully appreciate how large the leaves would be. I put a couple rows of Daikon seeds between rows of carrots in a raised galvanized steel bed where I had grown garlic earlier in the season. The leaves are now so big the tiny carrot leaves are hardly getting any sun. I’m pulling the radishes probably a bit early, though they are decent sized, to give the carrots a chance. No matter how hard I try, I always seem to find a way to fail at growing carrots!
Summer lettuce
In early July I planted about a dozen lettuce seedlings in beds also occupied by tomato and pepper plants. I did it to give them a chance to survive the summer sun by tucking them under the cooling shade cast by the taller tomatoes and peppers. It’s by and large been a success. The lettuce plants did not get overly large but we were able to go out in the garden before dinner and snip off leaves for salads each evening, or at least when a salad was on the menu (which in our house it almost always is!). This week the lettuce started to bolt despite the shade, so I’ve been harvesting the lettuce heads whole, or at least those worth salvaging. They’ve been in the garden for nearly seven weeks, so that’s an acceptable life span. It seems like I planted them only yesterday. Time certainly moves along.
Fall lettuce and arugula
As the summer lettuce was coming out of the garden this week, fall lettuce was going into it. I planted three varieties of lettuce and a frisee-style endive called curlesi that is a great performer. Like the spinach, these, too, were started on Aug. 6 and were deemed (by me) ready to go into the garden a little over two weeks later. In spring I like to give leafy green plants at least four weeks before planting, but I’m trying to get these fall vegetables into the garden while sunlight is still plentiful enough each day to help get them established. Hopefully we’ll be able to harvest from them into October. If you’re interested, I planted one new variety of lettuce, called Yugoslavian Red Butterhead, along with two head-style varieties, Ithaca and Hanson Improved, that were stars in the garden earlier in the year. I also planted about 20 arugula seedlings that were started indoors earlier in the month as well. In Italy, arugula was once known more commonly as a roadside weed but we certainly seem to sell a lot of it in our grocery stores in the United States and it always has a special place in our salad bowl or as a topping for a pizza after it comes out of the oven.
Previous updates:
What’s happening in the garden this week: Aug. 11-17
What’s happening in the garden: Aug. 4-10
What’s happening in the garden: July 28-Aug. 3
What’s happening in the garden: July 21-27
What’s happening in the garden: July 14-20
What’s happening in the garden: July 7-13
What’s happening in the garden: June 30-July 6
What’s happening in the garden: June 23-30
What’s happening in the garden June 16-22
What’s happening in the garden: June 9-15