Lettuce eat our greens, and reds and speckled and.....

Category: My Front Yard Garden | Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 4:25 pm

Good Morning:

Here is the update on my lettuce bed. I have now harvested three massive heads of Australian Yellow leaf, Bronze Mignonette & Speckled Lettuce. We have also eaten Spinach and some mescaline mix. I had some sort of small beetle feasting on the Mescaline mix and the tops of my radishes. But I figured that's OK they ate their fill and now appear to be gone, all part of organic gardening. I guess they were good trap crops.

Here is a couple of shots of lettuce harvested yesterday.

This is the Bronze Mignonette

Speckled Lettuce

Check out the size of that Lettuce. The container is a glad ware 13 cup or for Gardenstew himself and the other Metric based people out there, 3 liters.

Besides the ones already mentioned there is butter crunch in the above shot.

The purple in the bottom left is Cherokee, the bright green in the center is Adrianna and there is more Speckled and Bronze on the right.

Here are some detail shots

The speckled lettuce is my favorite looking. I had thought that the speckled or Bronze was a lettuce I had read that Thomas Jefferson grew at Monticello. When I looked it back up today I found that it was "Tennis Ball" I was thinking of, which is a butter head type dating back to the early 1800's. I'll have to try that one next year.

Here is some interesting reading for you regarding Thomas Jefferson and his gardening. Read carefully because there may be a quiz later. http://www.twinleaf.org/articles/vegetables.html I also found something very interesting regarding heirloom varieties versus hybrids today on the website vegparadise.com on their heirloom page

"Hybridized plants are the result of a cross between two varieties.
For instance, two varieties of tomatoes are chosen because each has
particular traits the grower wants to cultivate. When seeds are taken
from the cross-pollinated tomato, these seeds will not be able to
reproduce this crossed variety, but will revert back to one of the parents.
Heirlooms, which are open-pollinated plants, on the other hand, reproduce
themselves generation after generation."

That is something I did not know about hybrids. I'm afraid that I have become a bit of an heirloom snob over the past couple of years. I just have a bias against bigger better faster identical corporate style food, especially in my garden. I had better slow down before I get up on the second step of my soap box and give you a glimpse of my thoughts on corporate medicine vs homeopathic, the Pharmaceutical industry, corporate farming and the causes of the poor health in our modern world today.

And now back to our regularly scheduled blog entry...

Australian yellow leaf. I love all of the texture and shades of green in this shot.

Bronze Mignonette

Adrianna

Cherokee

Adrianna close-up

Cherokee close-up

Bloomsdale longstanding spinach.

That's enough for now. Future posts (I'm still in catch up mode)
1) Carrots beets and radishes
2) Tomatoes and peppers in the ground
3) Herbs
and maybe
4)a little on the flower beds around the house.

Seeya,

Uncle Jabba

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Gardenstew wrote on Mon May 14, 2007 5:09 pm:

So much lettuce, so little time. Very entertaining and enlightening blog entry Jabba (also with metric conversion bonus)

Looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

*scurries off to make a lettuce sandwich*

Todddumke1 wrote on Mon May 14, 2007 7:18 pm:

nice photography.. what is this metric system you speak of? us americans do not understand..... looks like your garden help "Jose Madre" could use a raise.

bahmiffed wrote on Sun Feb 08, 2009 6:07 am:

No doubt you've discovered by now most of the supermarket brands are chosen because they're tough as old boots, and can be shipped without damage, NOT because they taste good. Blue Lake green beans is an excellent example of same.

Beautiful photos. They helped me choose my seeds this year.

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