Tag Archives: lettuce

Garden, July 10 2014

DSC03521 Garden, July 10.  No new plantings since last spring.  I got a garlic, newly growing from cloves I planted last spring.  I pulled it up because I thought it was a weedy piece of grass.

DSC03518 It looks like a small onion, but it smells like garlic.  We CAN grow garlic.

DSC03520 And plantains.  They need attention, but they grow really well here.

DSC03505 The little feathery seedlings are dill, which self-seeded from such seed bearing flowers (below).

DSC03517 The flowers are at the upper left, and the skimpy roots are at the lower right.  After they have gone to seed, dill dries up and is refreshed by the baby plants from its seeds.  A possible project would be to see where the dill from the seeds I saved could grow in our yard in different times and places.  Dill and plantains have completed the life cycle by dying back and propagating for future crops.  These are self sustaining.

Garlic could become self-sustaining.

DSC03510 Basil (right of center)is growing well here, but not a few feet away, where it could not sink its roots in.

DSC03509 Carrots are taking off now.DSC03511 Parsnips are growing well.

DSC03514 Kohrabi (light green in front) with a tomato plant behind it.

DSC03513 More tomatoes are visible among the plants in the upper left quadrant.  The newly planted tomatoes, which had sprouted in June among the front yard plants,  have all disappeared.  I wonder if snails eat young tomato plants.

DSC03512 Cabbage has not done too well here.  Here is a barely growing cabbage.

DSC03503 Lettuce grows, and I am going to see if I can get some seeds from these plants.  Some of it may have seeded itself.  The trouble with lettuce here, is that after snails become active, I am afraid they may pass on dangerous parasites that they leave on the lettuce leaves, unless I cook it.

 

 

 

Cooked Lettuce And Snails

DSC02226 I found this 1/2 inch wide snail on some lettuce.  I vaguely remembered having heard of some rather devastating parasites that can be present in snails in some alternate forms.

DSC02225 Snails are a common gardening problem, and so I decided to cook my lettuce, to be 100% sure that we do not catch any theoretical  parasitic beasties.  I have not seen that snails eat parsley, cilantro, oregano, or marjoram.  In fact these seem to discourage creepy crawlies on nearby plants.  I could find that snails are very common in Texas gardens, and I’ve seen them myself.  I could find no place where snails in Texas gardens are stated to be dangerous online.  Until I find otherwise, I am going to be careful and cook or at least peal raw vegetables from our garden.

The other reason that I cooked the lettuce, is that most of it is old and bitter, even if not bolted.

Here are the keywords I googled to find  the link to the recipe which I used for our Stir Fry Lettuce:  Chinese Stir-Fry Lettuce With Garlic  Recipe .  Rhonda Parkinson, recipe author, tells us that the Chinese always cook their vegetables.  When I think about it, this seems to be my experience.  This five star recipe worked even with our bitter old lettuce!

 

 

Lettuce, Bolting and Bitterness

DSC02215 I was surprised to see a new lettuce bolted.  I brought it in, and found that it was not really the newly planted lettuce seed which had bolted, but rather it was an offshoot of an earlier harvested plant put into the ground last fall.  You can see the tall bolted lettuce is an offshoot of a cut off plant.  Right next to it is a shorter, more condensed, normal, newly seeded lettuce plant.  It is not an offshoot of the cut off plant.

This clearly showed that the older lettuce, which had been exposed to cold bolted.  In another set of harvested lettuces (not shown), it was clear that last fall’s plants which survived and are growing in early April, are bitter, whereas the fresh, spring planted lettuce that is now growing, is not bitter.  THe truly new, spring planted lettuce has not bolted yet.  It was new shoots from last fall’s lettuce which bolted!

Growing any garden utilizes energy from the sun.  Homegrown saves trips to the store, if not money.   It is good to learn what one can do with one’s seeds, soil, water, and sunshine!