Vegi Garden Flowers
variegated iris
We’ve been collecting photos of the winter vegi garden for a class that Anita will be teaching in the fall at Heather Farms, and this is our latest and possibly last crop of photos. We’re letting some things–the mache, the meadowfoam, the miner’s lettuce–go to seed, and a few things are entering or yet to reach their harvest phase–the favas and alpine strawberries, and later the onions and garlic–but most of the garden is now heading towards the summer phase, so this might be the last of the photos. One of the ideas of the class will be that folks should try to have a lot of flowers, including natives and perennials, mixed in with the edibles to attract beneficials. I put rest of today’s photo harvest below.
chard, allyssum, and mustard
meadowfoam and salad greens
alpine strawberry, woolly thyme, alyssum
cabbage, kale, miners lettuce, geranium
The kale is Red Russian, one of our favorites. The geranium “Bill Walls” in the background is in two pots that I move around the vegetable garden to cover up bare soil so that our neighbor’s cats don’t go to the bathroom there. They love the friable soil of our vegi garden, so if we wait even a couple of days between crops we need to have something covering the space. I’ve been expecting the miner’s lettuce, Claytonia perfoliata, to finish, but it keeps going and going. We’re leaving the larger seeds to form heads while we harvest the new growth that keeps appearing. We’ve been really happy with the miner’s lettuce. It sort of tastes generic green, but it’s good mixed into salads and it is extremely healthy. It’s been thriving at the shady end of the vegetable garden and should reseed itself heavily. TulipsintheWoods has a great post about miner’s lettuce. I learned that the Maidu called it Wedakdaka, which probably doesn’t roll off the tongue enough to mount a comeback and replace a great common name like miner’s lettuce, but is interesting to know nonetheless.
Update: Anita, my blog editor, says I need a photo of the variegated iris foliage, not just the bloom, so here it is, just outside the vegi bed, with alpine strawberry in the bed above it and a blessed calendula beside it getting ready for when it finishes blooming.
variegated iris, creeping thyme, calendula, alpine strawberry, california poppy
ryan 4/24
Tags: chard, iris, kale, miner's lettuce
This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under edibles, plants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 24th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
This is a joyful looking garden!
April 24th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Thanks. We like to think so.
I think I found the TulpsintheWoods miner’s lettuce post through your blogroll, so thanks for that, too.
April 24th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
That is a good idea placing a potted plant in the bare spaces, to keep kitty from using it as a bathroom.
April 24th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Whoot Wooly!
Woolly thyme is one of my favorites. It goes well with rock, takes foot traffic in walkway cracks (nice moss substitute) and produces a carpet of blooms where allowed to spread out in a mat.
No need to lecture ya on how a ‘mixed’ garden is best 🙂
April 24th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Great photos! So, how do you tell what’s a weed when it all starts?
April 27th, 2009 at 8:45 am
I have never tasted minor’s lettuce before. Do you have any recipe’s I could try?
April 27th, 2009 at 9:58 am
We don’t get many weeds in the vegi garden anymore, so most of what comes up is volunteers of what we might want, but then I do spend a bit of time thinning and moving the volunteers of the plants that we do want. It helps if I’ve grown a plant from seed; then I’m able to recognize the seedling. And sometimes I accidentally weed out plants I meant to keep.
We like miner’s lettuce mixed into salads, usually as about one fourth of the greens. One third miner’s lettuce, one third lettuce, one third mache with a bit of mustard green thrown in is a favorite. Add some sunflower seeds and a tahini-based salad dressing or a vinaigrette, and you have our standard side salad, mmm…