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Sow lettuce: It's time to plant (and plant again) |
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Written by Virginia A. Smith (MCT)
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Tuesday, 19 February 2008 |
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PHILADELPHIA —Peas and beans aren't the only early birds in the garden. In just a few weeks, lettuce seeds can be sown directly into the ground, too.
Peas' and beans' great big seed-balls go in around St. Patrick's Day. Lettuce's turn is mid-April, a good month before the bulk of our spring planting season begins.
But you have to be careful. Lettuce seeds are the size of fleas.
You can pretend they're peas or beans and lay each one carefully into the garden, barely covering them with soil, and hoping you don't sneeze. Or you can do what the experts archly call "broadcasting," which sounds high-tech but is quite the opposite:
You just scatter the seeds randomly, by the handful, over the whole garden bed, as you might sow grass or wildflower seed.
Yee-ha!
Now THAT'S easy. And so delicious when the lettuce plants, like tiny ears, poke through. Could take only a week.
No wonder Ellen Ecker Ogden—"a cook who loves to garden and a gardener who loves to cook" —calls lettuce "one of my favorite subjects." She's cofounder of the Cook's Garden, a mail-order seed company established in Vermont in 1984 and specializing in lettuces and European salad greens.
The Cook's Garden is now owned by W. Atlee Burpee, which moved the operation to its Warminster, Pa., headquarters in 2003. Ogden still runs the catalog from her home in the charming village of Manchester, where she also creates recipes, writes cookbooks, and gardens.
"You can grow lettuce anywhere," she says—in the ground, in a pot, on the windowsill.
Ogden plants in the ground—intensively, meaning very close together, resowing every two weeks till frost to have a constant supply. With all the varieties now available, it's possible to grow this traditional cool-weather crop all summer long.
Louise Mockaitis can attest to that. Last year, through the miracle of succession or staggered planting, she harvested lettuces—with scissors, so as not to rip the tender leaves—from spring till the end of December.
She did this in a shared 10-foot-by-20-foot plot in the community garden known as the Spring Gardens, which covers an entire city block from 18th to 19th and North to Wallace Streets. She also grew Swiss chard, herbs, cucumbers, peppers and thumping-big Brandywine and Big Boy tomatoes.
"I grow lettuces every year now. I didn't realize it was so easy," says Mockaitis, an apartment dweller since 1970.
She and her husband, who live six blocks away in a condo at the Philadelphian, like that Elizabethan favorite, salad burnet; it has a light, cucumber-y flavor and arrived in this part of the world with the Pilgrims. They also like the wide and frilly-leafed black-seeded Simpson, a fixture in North American gardens for more than a century.
Lettuces are way older than that. They are believed to have originated as bitter-tasting weeds among the wheat and barley grown in the rich valleys of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Long-leafed forms were first depicted about 4500 B.C. on tombs in Egypt, where they were also used as medicine and aphrodisiac.
The ancient Greeks and Romans cultivated lettuces for salads, as did more modern Europeans. They were first noted in China in the fifth century, and in the New World within two years of Columbus' arrival.
Forever, it seems, lettuce has been the foundation for great salads, even if, by the mid-20th century, the actual salads weren't that great. In the 1980s, mesclun appeared on the American scene, changing everything.
"In 1984, when we started Cook's Garden, unless you'd been to Europe, nobody knew what mesclun was," says Ogden, who found classic European mesclun formulas in old French and Italian gardening books.
Traditional French mesclun—the word means mix—consisted of equal parts chervil, arugula, lettuce and endive. It's come to be known here as spring mix, salad or field greens, and it can be a mix of almost anything.
The Cook's Garden, along with Burpee, Gardens Alive, Renee's Garden, Johnny's Selected Seeds, and Seeds of Change, to name a few, offer scores of varieties of unusual lettuces and mixes. In the pages of these catalogs, even romaines are romantic.
They're not the pale, watery blades you still find languishing in salad bars. They're wine-red like "Silvia" or lime green and red-flecked like "Forellenschluss." (Try saying that 10 times!)
These romaines are shaped like elongated tulips, all crisp and crinkly and looking so luscious you can hear the snap as you take a bite.
The mescluns come in blends of tangy, mild and savory or buttery, sweet, nutty and bitter. Here's the baby mesclun mix from Renee's Garden: "equal parts Rouge Grenobloise, Royal Oakleaf, Cimarron, Sucrine, Blonde Batavia and Red Salad Bowl."
Is it any wonder consumers—and gardeners—are lusting after lettuce? Here's one indicator: In 1996, the Burpee catalog carried 20 kinds; in 2008, there are 45. And sales have increased accordingly—10 percent to 15 percent a year, according to the company.
"Locavore," that trendy term, refers to people who like to eat and cook with ingredients grown within a 100-mile radius. If your locavoraciousness revolves around salad, here's a thought:
Become a gardener and grow your own. That way, 100 miles becomes 100 feet. And the eating is so very good.
Ellen Ogden may be all about gardening, but she's also an artist.
So she doesn't obsess over seeds in a row. She plants lettuce in "little waves and triangles and patterns" and mesclun in arcs and circles. And she puts pale greens next to deep reds next to lime greens and red freckles.
If it looks bizarre, no sweat. In two weeks, one crop will be gone, and it will be time to plant more. This is a concept, succession planting, that many home gardeners haven't mastered yet, thinking they have to use up all the seeds in a packet at once.
But it's not hard. "Mark your calendar," Ogden says. "It's like a reminder to give the dog heartworm medicine."
She sounds so relaxed about all this. Can it really be so easy?
Absolutely.
"Lettuce is one of the very easiest things to grow, so everybody should be able to grow some," says Deb Hatton of Upper Darby, who's been working in her own and other people's gardens for many years.
For lettuce, she recommends butterhead- or bibb-type, such as the heirloom "Four Seasons," which has burgundy leaves outside and green leaves inside, or the classic buttercrunch.
There are three other main types of lettuce: looseleaf or cutting, which includes the funky royal oak leaf and black-seeded Simpson; romaine; and crisphead. The latter includes the bright-green heirloom "Reine des Glaces," which has a jazzy serrated edge, and iceberg, which you can skip.
But it's mesclun that Hatton prizes. She buys gourmet blends and green or red salad mixes, which she likes because they're "cut and come again"—they keep on growing.
Remember that many, but not all, varieties will bolt, or shoot up and go to seed, when the summer turns hot, and that lettuce has shallow roots, so the soil must be kept moist.
Once those babies are ready to pick, here's Ogden's recipe for a dressing sublime enough to serve with "the queen of the salad bowl." (That would be lettuce.)
Just before serving, rub a garlic clove in the bottom of a wooden salad bowl and add a little sea salt. Chop the garlic fine and add 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, 1 tablespoon vinegar (tarragon, sherry, balsamic), 1 teaspoon maple syrup, ½ teaspoon Dijon mustard, salt, pepper. Whisk.
Add three types of lettuce, a smattering of mesclun greens, and edible flowers, such as Johnny-jump-ups, calendula or nasturtiums.
Eat after, not before, the main course, to cleanse the palate. And serve your homegrown tomatoes, accustomed to being the star of any gardener's table, on the side.
SEED FINDER
Here are some online sources for unusual lettuce seeds:
Botanical Interests, www.botanicalinterests.com, www.burpee.com
The Cook's Garden, www.cooksgarden.com
Gurney's Seed & Nursery, www.gurneys.com
Johnny's Selected Seeds, www.johnnyseeds.com
John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds, www.kitchengardenseeds.com
Renee's Garden, www.reneesgarden.com
Seeds of Change, www.seedsofchange.com
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