Season's first salad

Last night, we enjoyed our first fresh-from-the-garden salad of the year: baby spinach, baby arugula, mizuna (Japanese mustard green), and some bunching onions (scallions) that had overwintered from last year's garden tossed with store-bought red onion, black olives, and feta cheese. Dressed with a sprinkle of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and fresh ground black pepper. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!


I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote back in April that my April 13th planting of lettuces and salad greens would be ready in 2-3 weeks. Wishful thinking, I guess (and not reading the seed packet ;-) It's been roughly 5 weeks since planting and though I've been munching on some of the salad greens right out in the garden for over a week now, the lettuces are only just now getting to the point where they can be clipped and harvested. In fact, besides pinching off a leaf here and there to taste, I probably won't harvest any for a salad for another week or two. (Note to self: Plant earlier next year ;-)

However, now's the time for me to think (and act) about succession planting all the lettuces and salad greens that I haven't already -- either with the same varieties or different varieties as taste dictates. I've already planted a second 2 rows of spinach and need to do the same for the rest. Succession planting ensures consistently high quality ingredients throughout the growing season and is one of the mantras of Eliot Coleman's (and really all good gardeners') approach to getting the most and the best out of the garden. As current crops fade, they're replaced by vibrant, tasty, new ones. And one's palate is the beneficiary! I'll be planting new rows of lettuces and salad greens this w/e.

Of things spinach and succession planting

I was carrying on a gardening conversation with my friend Joann via Facebook recently. I mentioned spinach as an early spring crop possibility and she said she'd try it next year. But there's no time like the present and there's no reason to put yourself in a box about only planting once a season in your garden.

It's not too late to plant spinach this year even though you could have started sowing it back in late March. It likes cooler weather better but you can seed short rows (2-4 feet long) of it every week from now until the end of May. This way you get succession crops so when you finish the older stuff, the newer stuff becomes available. Also, once the spinach is up high enough, you can mulch it with straw to help keep the soil cooler and keep it from drying out too fast.

I've also planted spinach much later than the end of May. It's good to experiment and see what works for you. It may bolt but what did you lose if it does? A few minutes of planting and a few feet of your garden for a few weeks? Small price to pay.

A warm/hot weather option is New Zealand spinach which isn't a spinach at all (I think it's part of the onion family) but looks like and tastes like spinach when cooked. It also grows like crazy and only a couple/three plants will keep you in it. You can order it from online organic seed companies like Fedco.

Succession planting is one of the credos of one of my two gardening book mentors: Eliot Coleman (the other is Lee Reich). In his books (I have Four Season Harvest and The New Organic Grower), he recommends that you not relegate planting of a crop to the beginning of the growing season but to think of growing seasons as fluid where sowing and harvesting can overlap and be used to extend the harvest and maintain the freshness of your garden vegetables. In Four Season Harvest, Coleman provides a nice table of recommendations for succession planting summarized here:

Beans Every 2 weeks
Beets Every 2 weeks
Carrots Every 2 weeks
Celery Twice: early spring and three months before fall frost
Cucumbers A 2nd and 3rd planting at monthly intervals to keep quality high
Lettuce/greens Every week or two
Peas Twice: early spring and mid-summer
Radishes Every week
Spinach Every week in spring and late summer.
Squash A 2nd and 3rd planting at monthly intervals to keep quality high

My cousin Chris, the vintner at his family's winery, Lakewood Vineyards, and avid gardener turned me on to Eliot Coleman's books and methods. Coleman advocates low impact, quality yield organic growing methods that anyone can adopt and extend as their own. He farms in coastal Maine so he knows about late springs and early falls and how to adapt to grow and harvest crops all year long. And to prove that Coleman's suggestions work, my cousin Chris showed me his cold frame: the one he was dusting snow off of when he harvested salad greens in February! More on cold frames in a future post ;-)