Growing Gourmet Lettuce and Micro Greens

Vegetable garden harvest from 2010.

I've been harvesting gourmet lettuce and micro greens almost daily.  The seeds cost me a whopping $2 or so - I purchased several 25 cent seed packets for Romaine lettuce and spinach at the dollar store, and the other $1 or so went towards a package of mixed micro greens.  "Greens" is a misnomer because among the various lettuces is a gorgeous ruby-red leafed variety that has a beautiful crisp, slightly tangy flavor.  The lettuce was slow to start but has been growing robustly over the past several weeks, probably thanks to the soaker hoses we added to each of the garden beds.

I don't pull up my lettuce plants when I harvest the greens. I have a special pair of very sharp scissors in the kitchen. I simply take a metal bowl out to the garden and my scissors, snip the leaves I need for my meal, and leave the plants in the ground.  Depending on how hot it gets here over the next several weeks, I may get another harvest of lettuce or it may bolt and go to seed.  One type of lettuce from among the varieties in the mixed greens package has already bolted.  Bolting means the lettuce plant produces a long stalk with a flower on the end. The purpose is to produce seeds. Once you see that long central core, stem or flower, the lettuce is past its prime and generally speaking, unpalatable.  It tastes bitter. It's best to just pull up the plant and compost it.

Once the lettuce is harvested, I either rinse it under the garden hose or very, very carefully rinse it immediately in the sink.  Earwigs are plentiful among the lettuce. If you have never seen an earwig, it is a revolting little insect - harmless, I think, but disgusting nonetheless, with pincers and beetle-like features.  It's just one of those creepy things that I hate seeing in my salad.  A quick rinse with cool water chases them out.  That's why I like rinsing the greens outside - I can chase the insects back into nature where they belong, and not into my kitchen!

I dress the salad simply with extra virgin olive oil and a splash of either lemon juice or cider vinegar, salt and pepper. That's it.  The luscious baby greens and fresh-from-the garden organic lettuce is delicious on its own.

Remember how in January I promised to show you how gardening and growing your own vegetables saves money?  Here's how it looks so far with the lettuce crop (and I have more plants growing out there than I have harvested so far):


Seeds - Cost

• Romaine lettuce  - two packages of 25 cent seeds from the dollar store (.50)
• Spinach - for salads - one package of 25 cent seeds from the dollar store (.25)
• Mixed baby gourmet lettuce greens - $1.79  ($1.79)

Total expense for seeds:  $2.54 for seeds.

I am not counting the investment in the soaker hose, although if you are interested, a 25 foot soaker hose from a big box store cost about $9.  I think we had a coupon and saved a few dollars.

I used no special fertilizer other than good old fashioned garden compost.  The lettuce was grown completely organically with no pesticides or chemical fertilizers of any kind used on or near the plants.

I have harvested to date the equivalent of:

Estimated Cost if Purchased at the Store

• Two large bags of gourmet mixed organic salad greens.  Kroger (our local supermarket) sells organic salad greens by the bag for about $2.99 each.   Estimated value:  $5.98

• Two heads of Romaine lettuce. I can't find a price for organic Romaine.  Wal-Mart had heads of Romaine lettuce for sale for $1.79.  They were slightly bigger than mine and fuller. They were conventionally grown.  I will estimate my two heads of lettuce harvested to date at just $1.79. (But note, I have six more growing in the garden!)

Total estimated value of foods grown at home:  $7.77

$7.77 minus $2.54 for seeds = $5.23

So....although not a huge savings, I have saved $5.23 in salad greens this month. More importantly, I grew them myself. They are completely organic.  They weren't trucked miles and miles from a farm in California, but grew about 20 feet from my kitchen.  I have no way of estimating the health value of eating freshly picked greens over eating greens that have been picked several days ago and trucked or flown from one coast to the other, but my instinct says it is indeed healthier.

I spent very little time on the lettuce bed.  I weeded it once, just a quick pass-by with my weeding bucket and a quick pick up of some weeds. The hardest part of growing lettuce is simply remembering to turn on the hoses and water it when we haven't had rain for a few days.

How is your vegetable garden growing?  Did you grow lettuce this year? If so, how did it turn out?

Scabiosa Butterfly Blue Perennial Flowers for Butterfly Gardens

Scabiosa "Butterfly Blue" lives up to its name.

Among the perennial flowers for butterfly gardens, Scabiosa "Butterfly Blue" is one that is easy to overlook in my garden - until the butterflies arrive en masse. Scabiosa is a genus of flowering plants known for their nectar-rich blossoms.  The flowers can be the typical blue (some people call it a light blue-lavender color), white or pink.  Scabiosas need full sun, and they tend to bloom profusely once the hot weather arrives.  Here in Virginia that means a LONG blooming time! They don't mind drought once they become established, and they make nice edging plants.  They only grow about 6-10 inches tall, and you can easily line a walkway or border with Scabiosa.

My own Scabiosa arrived as part of the sunny perennial flower garden kit I purchased from a catalog in 2008.  We followed the suggested garden design map that came with the plants, and so they are grouped in little arrangements of 3 plants that I find more attractive than lining them up like soldiers marching along the border. My garden tends to be informal and messy, so this works better for me than a more formal arrangement.

One of the reasons I have grown to like and respect Scabiosa is that it helps my garden transition from the spring colors into the summer colors. Colors tend to go in waves in my garden. Early spring brings pinks and lilac colors throughout the garden, with yellow as an accent.  Around this time of year - late May, early June - the pinks and lilacs transition into the hot yellows and reds, but I have some purples and blues to cool down all those hot tones. That's where the Scabiosa comes in. It's among the Gaillardia, which has so many orange-yellow flowers that it can overpower that part of the garden. The neat little pincushion blue Scabiosa flowers, about the size of a quarter each, just add the right shade of coolness to the "hot" colors of the garden.

I love to grow flowers that attract butterflies, and that's the best part of growing Scabiosa - butterflies! Today when I stepped outside to see what I could photograph, one butterfly (I think it's a Painted Lady) happily posed for me.  Since I love to take photographs of the garden, including nectar-rich plants like Scabiosa that attract all types of butterflies adds to my fun as I seek interesting things to photograph outside.

Try Scabiosa "Butterfly Blue" (shown here) or one of the pinks.  I have some pinks somewhere in the garden but they aren't blooming yet. When they do, I will be sure to take pictures!

Peonies in the Garden

Peony "Festiva Maxima"

I love spotting old fashioned garden favorites such as peonies, irises and daylilies, especially when they're growing near an older home in the neighborhood. One of the reasons I love living in an area rich in history, such as our little corner of Virginia where the Civil War ended, is that there are many old farms, houses and properties untouched by the hand of time and the bulldozer.  In our little country town, for example, there are many homes built in the late 1800s and into the early 20th century. They're clustered near the remains of the old railroad station and the still-open post office.  One home has a row of peony bushes growing along an old rusty wire fence that produces such a dazzling display of blossoms each spring I keep meaning to take my camera into town to photograph them.  But of course, by the time I remember that it's peony time, a good thunderstorm comes and my own garden peonies look like bedraggled messes.  So it's probably too late to stop by the old home and snap a few pictures of the peonies

I love old-fashioned garden flowers, the kind that looks like they belong clustered around a Victorian cottage or in a 19th century gardening catalog or print.  The kind of flowers that my grandmother or great-grandmother would recognize.  I know, I know - some of the new hybrids are beautiful and dazzling too, and I agree. Many are also grown for great disease resistance, and that's something to love, too.  But I can't help but be charmed by old-fashioned beauties growing over an old picket fence, near the remains of a farmhouse or an old privy. There's something enchanting about it.

My own peonies here in the flower gardens of Seven Oaks are just three years old or so. I planted them in the spring of 2008, a kit of five different peonies from Breck's gardening catalog.  Four of the five survived and of course I lost the plant tags, so I'm forever trying to match flowers with the pictures on the packages. I saved the package at least and taped it into a page in my gardening catalog, aka the glorified three ring binder.

I'm pretty sure my peony varieties include:

• President Taft
• Dr. Alexander Fleming 
• Festiva Maxima
• Sorbet

Peony "Sorbet"

Among the three, Festiva Maxima remains my all-time favorite, but Sorbet, with its charming mix of pinks and pastel shades, also gives me great joy when it blooms in the garden.

The peonies are just about over for the season, but I thought I'd share the photos from my garden today as well as links to two articles on Hub Pages about peonies -

• Growing Peonies
• Ants on Peony Bushes

And by the way, ants are normal. Don't spray them. They're just doing their usual job of finding food and they don't harm your plants at all.

Happy gardening and happy peony season, if they're blooming in your gardening zone!

Good Bye Old Times

As I sat down to write this post, the Lynchburg classical music station began playing one of my favorite symphonic pieces - Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, by Claude Debussy. I can vividly recall the first time I heard this wonderful work.  It was in 2000, in Alice Tully Hall in New York City.  I used to keep a radio tuned to the local classical music station in my office in New York City so I always had soft, ambient music to keep me company and soothe my spirits throughout the day. Lee, one of my coworkers, someone I did not know very well, came by with a yellow mimeographed flyer in her hand.  "I noticed that you like classical music," she said.  "Did you know that the Julliard School students perform concerts every Wednesday at 1pm? It's free of charge and you can bring a brown bag lunch!"  We made a date.  We brought our sandwiches and sodas into Alice Tully Hall. It was only half full, mostly with what looked like retirees and a sprinkling of business people like ourselves. It was one of my best memories from the years I worked at that particular company and Lee and I caught a few more concerts together before she left the company.

It was a wonderful few years I worked at that company.  I spoke with an old friend today who told me that another of our coworkers, J, had recently passed away. No one can find out any details on J's passing.  It was sudden and unexpected.  I find it hard to imagine the world without him.  I did not keep in touch with him except through Facebook, but he would always pop into my email every once in a while with a baseball score or two.  It made me sad to think of him leaving this world. He was smart as a tack and so funny he would make your sides hurt. He had a wry, sarcastic sense of humor and impeccable timing.  He could make faces at people behind their back and in a split second, be all polite and listening to you.  He had a wonderful gift for working with our customers and the customers loved him.  Best of all, he was kind; when he was sarcastic, it was to pinprick us when we felt our heads swell with importance, or when we lost site of the people we were supposed to be serving.

Talking to my former colleague, another person with whom I'd shared those marvelous days, made me feel a bit nostalgic.  The other day I was thinking of a former boss from that company who had died many years ago.  He was a gifted copywriter, one of the best I have ever worked with, who taught me so much about writing in the 8 months I worked with him that I silently thank him in my heart when I write, and I silently ask his forgiveness for my being a know-it-all upstart.  I wasn't always kind to him and I wish I could go back in time and tell him "thank you."

So many good memories.  I feel nostalgic but not sad.  It helped me to talk to my friend, to realize that the happy memories will always stay with me.  Times have changed and the company has changed.  New leadership is coming aboard.  I will not be there to experience its next incarnation, and that's okay.  I have wonderful memories of what life can be life when people in a company genuinely like and respect one another.  During the years I worked there, I had the pleasure of working with so many bright, talented, dedicated people, many of whom I have kept in touch with over the years.

I think that says a lot.  When people you work with become like family, and it's a decade later and you still pick up the phone to catch up, you know your good memories are true.  True, good and bright.

Be well, J.  I hope you rest in peace and thank you for the wonderful memories.

Soaker Hoses for the Vegetable Garden

We chose to use soaker hoses in the vegetable garden this year, and so far we think it's going to pay off in several ways. What's a soaker hose? It's a special type of garden hoses that has tiny holes all along the length. You place the hose near the roots of the plant and allow water to drip into the ground rather than spray on top of the plant, as you would if you were using your garden hose or a sprinkler to water the plants. Water is directed to the ground, where it can soak into the soil near the roots and do the most good. Plants absorb water from the roots.  Many people stand at the edge of their garden with a hose, shooting streams of water at the leaves of their plants. Unfortunately, that does little good, since the plants can't drink through their leaves. They need moisture in the soil for their water source.

We used U-shaped pins to anchor the soaker hose in place. At first we used landscape fabric pins, but they were expensive, and if the hose jerked from a bit of air in the line, it tended to pull the pins right out of the soil.  I came up with the bright idea of using wireframe coat hangers instead. We snip off the curve that hangs over the clothes rod and bend them into U-shaped pins with longer arms.  These work great to hold the soaker hose in place. You push the ends of the pins into the ground, allowing the curve of the U to push the hose into place.

I like the drip irrigation system around the vegetable plants for many reasons. We're on well water, and we don't want to waste the resources or the well pump.  The soaker hose seems to use less water. What it does use, it aims directly where the plant needs it, and leaves the rest of the soil dry.  Hopefully that will discourage some of the weeds from taking root, too!

We noticed that the soil stayed moist near the hose area for a long time after we turned off the water.  We realized that the hose continued to drop for a while after the water source was shut off, another benefit.

So far, our plants seem to like the soaker hose. Time will tell if our investment pays off.  We have growing in the vegetable garden the following:

• Garlic - elephant bulbs
• Onions - three kinds (white, red, Spanish)
• Beets - Detroit Dark red and golden
• Tomatoes - five kinds including Mortgage Lifter, Supersonic, Better Boy, Early Girl, Sweet 100s and Golden Stripe, an heirloom
• Peppers - California Wonder, a green bell
• Eggplant - Black Beauty
• Lettuce - about five kinds of lettuce
• Greens - Swiss chard, broccoli rabe, spinach (for salads)
• Radishes
• Sweet potato - "Beauregard"
• Potatoes - Yukon Gold, Russet, Kennebec
• Asparagus - Jersey Giant
• Strawberries - Everbearing
• Cucumbers - Bush Burpless
• Zucchini

And that's what we have growing so far.  I harvested two strawberries, four radishes, and I feel triumphant. 

An Introduction to Groundcovers

I wrote today's post on choosing groundcovers for Mainline Gardening,  an online gardening community. I hope you enjoy it. It's been a busy week with a lot of work projects on my desk, so I haven't had much time to write for pleasure.  I did have the distinct pleasure of taking two friends from the Master Gardener program on a tour of the gardens today. It was fun to share with them the evolution of the gardens and share my plants!  I volunteered at the Heart of Virginia Master Gardener Plant Sale last weekend and had so much fun.  If you came to the sale, thank you so much for supporting the master gardeners.

Enjoy the article on choosing groundcovers.

The Wandering Garden Path

I still marvel at how the garden paths have given the flower garden here at Seven Oaks their shape, and something of a personality.  I really underestimated the impact that hardscapes - the permanent (or nearly permanent) landscape features have on the garden. Frankly, I find hardscapes boring.  I hate looking at stone edging at Lowe's and I'm terrible at picking out something that will look good. You should have seen me picking out colors for the tile in the house when we were building it - I was a nervous wreck. I kept telling myself, "If you really hate it, you can change it. It's expensive but you can change it."  That's kind of how I felt about the hardscapes here.

First of all, like most things in this garden, they all happened by accident. I never intended the flower garden to have pathways.  Originally, we didn't want to mow that steep hillside with the riding mower.  So John asked me to plant "a few flowers" (famous last words around here.)  I ordered some daylilies and peonies. It wasn't enough to cover the hillside.  Every time it rained, channels like the canals on Mars appeared in the red clay soil on the hillside. All I could see was the remaining topsoil washing into the woods without plant roots to hold it in place.  We couldn't wait for the daylilies and peonies to help hold the hillside in place.

That's when John asked me if we could buy some garden kits he'd seen in a catalog. I said yes. We decided to carve out beds or "garden rooms" for the plant kits. Most of the area is in full sun, but we did have a shady area so that became the shade garden, the flat area became the butterfly garden, and the top of the slope next to the driveway that gets baked by the hot summer sun  welcomed two "sunny perennial" gardens.

But what to do about the pathways? First, I gathered pails of rocks from the lawn area. They only wreck the lawn mower blades anyway. I outlined the paths and chose a natural, flowing outline rather than a stiff, formal look. It suited the country atmosphere and the hybrid architecture of our home, a combination of formal Victorian and modern.

Spring 2008 - you can see the bare garden, the original paths

Paths outlined, now we worked on the beds. The first two years, I spent many summer mornings on hands and knees weeding the pathways. I finally got sick of it. We decided to buy slates for the paths but we made a big mistake. Instead of buying slates made especially for pathways, we bought slates used for stone walls. What's the difference? Slates for pathways are of an even thickness. Slates for stone walls are uneven.  When the slates are uneven, you're walking on shifting slates or an uneven path, and it's not pretty.

So then we tried to fix the pathways with sand.  Another big mistake. We thought that by putting down landscape fabric first, then sand on top and the slates, we could fit the slates together like a puzzle. Not only was it impossible to fit them together but the rain washed all the sand away from the path and dumped it into my shade garden.  My shade garden was history for about two years.  Sand + Clay = Concrete (or what passes for concrete in the shade garden.)

So the last option John came up with were the pebbles.  We found economical bags of them marked for concrete work at Lowe's. We didn't have a truck, just a regular small compact car, so we bought about six bags at a time each week that first year. We got about a third of the paths done before winter.  It looked nice. We used baseball or larger sized rocks from around the property cemented together to create the edging.

Now we had a third of the paths done and were eager last year to finish them. As soon as the snows melted last year we drove to Lowe's. We couldn't find the same bags. We searched and searched and finally the manager tracked down the product, but it was no longer made!  So now we had one third of the garden with white rocks and we could not find the same product anywhere.

A quick to Jamersons, the local building supply company, and we found something similar - but not a perfect match.  A dump truck full of stones arrived and we mixed them in with the white rocks so that the paths were now uniform.  Sigh of relief.  John finished placing the slates, I weed whatever dares grow among the rocks and pebbles and we have PATHWAYS!

A littler nicer in 2012 than 2008, wouldn't you say?

It took us four years - from the spring of 2008, when I first used smaller rocks to outline the pathways to spring 2012 when we completed the area we'd originally set out to do.  It was hard work.  I will say that hauling pails of stones and pushing a wheelbarrow full of slates and stones did wonders for my biceps. I like weight training exercises but in the spring I don't have to weight train - hauling pails of rocks is enough weight training for the best of us.

Similar view to 2008 (well cap among boxwoods helps you compare) - May 2012

So here are pictures, taken last evening, of my garden.  It needs more weeding (okay, when doesn't it need more weeding?) but May is always its best month.  The spring flowers bloom and the Japanese beetles haven't arrived to dine yet.  Rains are still plentiful and the heat tolerable. In a few short weeks, heat, drought and my unwelcome beetle visitors will make it look like a horde of college kids on spring break wandered through. But until then, I feel like I've created a bit of paradise on earth here at Seven Oaks.

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Tomorrow, Saturday May 5, 2012, is the Heart of Virginia Festival in our home town of Farmville, Virginia.  If you are coming to the festival, please come to the Heart of Virginia Master Gardeners' Plant Sale.  The Master Gardeners will be at the old train station on 3rd Street selling plants and answering your gardening questions.  I will be there early in the morning until around 10 a.m. but go gently on me with the questions - I'm new at the Master Gardener thing.  I hope you stop by and find some plants you like at the sale!

Tips for Growing Rhododendrons

Rhododendrons and azaleas are two of my favorite foundation plants, and I love the variety of colors I can grow here in south central Virginia. We planted two rhododendrons in full sun along a hot southern facing portion of the foundation of our home, which was not a great idea. It's probably too hot for them there. They tend to like dappled sunlight. Think of a forest; rhododendrons are under story plants. They grow under the canopy of big deciduous trees.  One time John and I were hiking in June in the western part of Pennsylvania. We hiked a trail through a thick forest and it suddenly opened up to a breathtaking sight - Mountain Laurel and rhododendrons in full bloom along the trail. I'll never forget the golden sunlight filtering through the tall tulip trees, oaks and maples, and the hum of the bees on the flowers.

My article today for Mainline Gardening, an online gardening community, focuses on growing rhododendrons. There are two links at the end of the article with more information. They are kind of hidden in the text. One will take you to the American Rhododendron Society and the other two a short video on rhodies on the Penn State Cooperative Extension website.

The picture shown here is one I took yesterday. I saw this odd looking insect and started snapping away. He looks like a bee but has antennae like a moth, and wings like a moth.  He obligingly posed for this photo. Anyone know what his real name is? We keep calling him the hummingbird moth.

Harvesting the Carrots

This weekend, I harvested the last of the fall/winter carrots. The little guy in the picture helping me is Flat Stanley.  He's part of a literacy project from my nephew's Long Island school. Flat Stanley travels around the world, and when he arrives at his destination, his host family writes about the local area. My nephew (and the other children in his 2nd grade class) colored their Flat Stanley cut outs and mailed them out.  We are supposed to take a photo, write a letter, or enclose pictures with Flat Stanley sharing our part of the world with the class. We debated taking Flat Stanley to the town of Appomattox, which is just about 15 minutes away and the place where the American Civil War ended. There is a museum there, cannons, and a lot of historic stuff, but we realized that 2nd graders probably have not studied the American Civil War.  The boys in the class would like the cannons but the girls wouldn't care.  So we decided to keep Flat Stanley closer to home and use this as an opportunity to show the children where their food comes from, since they are youngsters growing up in an urban environment.

We created a little booklet about Flat Stanley's adventures on our 'farm' and his visit to the neighbor across the road who raises beef cattle. When I first saw the coloring book character taped to a stick, I thought, "Oh no, this looks like a bad imitation of Mr. Bill."  That's the character from the old Saturday Night Live skits.  We had a lot of giggles about Flat Stanley meeting the paper shredder, Flat Stanley meeting the fireplace and all of that, but at the end of the day when we actually sat down to think about it we ended up with a really cute little booklet for the 2nd grade class.  I hope they enjoy it!  Flat Stanley helped me pick carrots, showed the children what Swiss chard looks like, pointed out peaches on a peach tree, and even posed with a neighbor's black Angus calf. 

The carrots were just so-so (although I believe Flat Stanley thought they were tasty.)  I left them in the ground too long. I planted the seeds last fall, and I planted too many, so I've been waiting and waiting to pick them since my refrigerator is full and I'm too lazy to blanch and freeze anymore.  But the beets won't wait, and we have only three of the raised beds in the vegetable garden area made without treated lumber. When we constructed the vegetable garden, we created three of the raised beds with untreated lumber and the rest from treated lumber, thinking that we'd put the root crops in the untreated bed.  Our research showed that for the most part, the modern methods of treating lumber make it safe to use in vegetable gardens, but we didn't want to take a chance. I have to say that treated or untreated lumber seems to have made absolutely NO difference in how long the wood lasted in the garden.  Several beds needed to have corners repaired this year.  The weight of the soil seems to be pushing out the corners and bowing the wood on the treated and untreated lumber alike. The only difference between the two types of wood is that the untreated lumber is already growing some sort of mushroom, like a log in the forest, but both types of lumber are showing wear and tear faster than we anticipated.  Treated lumber has some kind of chemical applied to the wood which is supposed to make it last longer and be more resistant to moisture and rot. We repaired them using metal brackets screwed over the corner.  John worked the drill while I pushed the wood into place.  We figure we will have to replace the beds every few years, and decided that next year we will begin a rotating schedule of replacement so that the entire group of raised beds is replaced in succession.

So the carrots were so-so, with many of them split, cracked, or with the telltale holes from the carrot fly larvae.  You can eat these but the holes mean more work cutting out the part that the insects got to. Some of the carrots were just old, with a texture like wood pulp, and these I composted almost immediately.  I pulled all the carrots on Saturday morning then sat in a lawn chair and cleaned them outside. I put the tops into the wheelbarrow to make it easier to move them into the compost pile.

We planted the beet seeds in the raised bed where we had the carrots.  A small corner of the bed now has the garlic, and it looks like the dill seeded freely last year as I have several plants growing among the garlic.  The garlic took off, and I have high hopes for it.  It really does pay to purchase good quality starter sets, roots and plants from a nursery. I am growing "Elephant" garlic - the huge heads with big white cloves.  It stores really well and I have stored it in the basement for up to two years.

I'm growing two types of beets this year.  Beet "Detroit Dark Red" is an old favorite and a traditional garden crop.  These are Burpee seeds, and I have excellent luck with them in the garden. The beets are sweet and tasty, cook up well and also can very well when I make pickled beets.  I also planted "Golden" beets, my favorite heirloom.  The beets are golden-apricot color and are just beautiful to look at. I first encountered golden beets in New York City, of all places, at a restaurant called Josephina's by Lincoln Center.  I worked around the corner from there and my friends and I would go to Josephina's for special occasions. One of my favorite dishes of all was a golden beet salad.  It consisted of dark green lettuces, with lightly steamed and sliced golden beets on top of the lettuce and a sprinkling of sweet onions and either walnut or pumpkin seeds. A bit of feta cheese and vinegar and oil and it was a feast for a king.  I'm counting down the 60 days to harvest on these beets and I will recreate my Josephina's salad with fresh beets from the garden!