Let us talk about lettuce. And other greens.
Or we can talk about the desperate need of vegetable plants
in general for light.
Here is the four-by-four raised bed where I planted lettuce
last November:
Yes, I said last November.
I learned an important lesson this past winter: plants won’t
grow if most days are cloudy, and many of those days are dark enough to be
rainy. I grew various greens for at least six seasons, spring and fall, in
north Texas and had little trouble growing them once they were big enough that
a pill bug couldn’t take them out in a single meal. We had lettuce, kale,
spinach, and cabbage for about three months in the late winter through spring,
and October through December. A couple of the recent warm winters, I actually had
greens grow continually without bolting (growing tall and going to seed) from
October and November all the way through April!
And always, always,
the plants were big enough to begin to cut leaves off of within six to eight
weeks of the seedlings popping out of the ground.
This year, however, the lettuce did not get big enough to harvest
from until February – four months.
And the plants weren’t as big as they usually get after sixty days of growing.
Now the lettuce bed is beautiful, but this spring is warmer
than last and so the plants are beginning to bolt:
If you look carefully, you can see the stem on this leaf
lettuce plant that’s growing taller. At this point, the leaves turn bitter.
They’re still palatable, and I’m going to harvest them until the leaves taste
more like that of their ancestor, the dandelion.
Then there’s the spinach.
The spinach actually took longer to be big enough to cut from
than the lettuce, which made me sad because they are PERFECT for green smoothies.
But now look how big they’ve grown! (It's a bit wider than the span of my hand.)
I’m sure they’re just about to bolt, too, because they don’t
like daytime temps above seventy degrees F. But at least spinach leaves don’t
turn bitter when the plants go to seed.
Not to worry, though! We have other alternatives to greens
that are growing – and I’ll share those with you soon!
