PlainJane wrote: ↑Tue Dec 31, 2024 11:00 am Wow, you shouldn’t have to buy greens for quite a while.

I’ve been sowing lettuce and salad green seeds with the idea of having lettuce and such well into the spring. I’ll see how that idea actually plays out.

Store bought lettuce increasingly is a downer. I don’t think it is viable for me to completely replace store bought lettuce, but I find the homegrown lettuce so much more appealing than store lettuce.

Making a salad tonight with all these fresh greens. Runway arugula, buttercrunch lettuce, lavewa spinach, new red fire lettuce, among others.

Lettuce isn’t made for pounding rain.

Meanwhile, escarole and endive is a little more durable.

Nice looking Green Curled Ruffec

Yak54 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 1:14 pm Nice looking Green Curled Ruffec

They have a way to go before I harvest.

I get more excited about the escarole and the soup I can make with it. These chicories are way slow to mature, though.

That must've been an awful rain pounding, karstopography.
Looks like frost damage - maybe they were a bit too cold before the rain hit em?

bower wrote: ↑Sat Jan 11, 2025 7:57 am That must've been an awful rain pounding, karstopography.
Looks like frost damage - maybe they were a bit too cold before the rain hit em?

You know it is interesting about the potential for frost damage.@bower There’s arguments for and arguments against. The arguments against are that nearby jalapeño and bush beans plants show zero detectable signs of frost damage. My understanding is that Chile and bean plants are frost sensitive, but perhaps that’s not completely true?

The argument for frost damage is that the airport 3-4 miles away registered a freeze.

The weather has been very windy and not far from freezing. I have noticed in past episodes of similar weather damage to vegetable leaves from the constant winds. So, the temperature hovers slightly above freezing, but yet with hours and hours of unrelenting wind the leaves ultimately end up with a dead and frost damaged look to them.

Only my buttercrunch lettuce has the burned look of frost damage or the wind damage or whatever it is. The pounding rain was a later event and that pounding rain damaged all of my tender lettuces including and besides the buttercrunch variety. None of the other lettuce have the burned look like the buttercrunch, just the chopped up, shredded look from the pounding rain.

One possibility is that a little frost settled only on the bed with the buttercrunch. That bed also gets most exposed to a strong NW or N wind so if the wind is a culprit for the damage, then position of the buttercrunch lettuce would put it in the most exposed location.

Normally, without the strong and persistent wind, I’ve had lettuce survive sub freezing temperatures, but the outer leaves will often get that burned look.

I think the lettuce will mostly bounce back should we be able to dodge any more violent storms. That’s a big if though.

I agree @karstopography that bush beans are 100% frost sensitive and would show damage. Peppers are surprisingly tough.
I do think lettuce leaf is variable depending on growth conditions. Maybe that variety had gotten super tender growing in warm and moist temperatures and light winds, and then wasn't ready for the extremes.
Even after a dozen years of hobnobbing with gardeners around the world, I still blink every now and then, over how different our climate norms can be. We get more than plenty rain here on an annual basis, but the kind of extreme pelting downpours which you get on the continent are actually pretty rare. So there may well be lettuce damage that is typical of extreme rain that I just have never seen. Wind damage, we would never see it either because it's so windy here, anything grown outdoors has grown in those conditions. Too much wind for too long can make them tough and not worth eating, but we wouldn't see leaves actually crushed or damaged by the wind.

Texas is near the tops for extreme rain events. Alvin right up the road from me got 43” of rain in one 24 hour period back in 1979. That’s almost 2” of rain every hour for an entire 24 hours period. That event remains the record for 24 hour rainfall for the Continental US. Look it up if you like.

One of the Jack Reacher books written by Lee Child is set in Texas. Lee Child totally nails it on how extremely hard it can rain here.

I've had no issues with moderate upper 20's cold on hardened lettuce, though sudden cold on very tender young plants could do some damage. I've had protected lettuce survive into the teens with the only damage being frozen and burst leaf ribs. The burned look around leaf edges after a relentless wind event is tip burn and those plants rarely recover.

I direct seeded some “wild” type arugula, Diplotaxis tenuifolia. We taste tested against the Eruca vesicaria, “normal” arugula.

The wild type won.

I've got seed of both arugulas to sow too! Getting excited about planting, since I got my seeds from Nicky's swap.
I have seed for a really interesting lettuce called Giant Blue Feather. Should be large and long lasting? Warm weather crop which doesn't bolt, so I should probably wait to sow that one.

bower wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2025 9:34 pm I've got seed of both arugulas to sow too! Getting excited about planting, since I got my seeds from Nicky's swap.
I have seed for a really interesting lettuce called Giant Blue Feather. Should be large and long lasting? Warm weather crop which doesn't bolt, so I should probably wait to sow that one.

Is Nicky (N, I assume) still running her swap?

I have 8 or nine lettuce varieties plus one endive for 2025 but I don’t start sowing seeds till late Feb. or early March. I’m starting to get the itch though.

Tormato wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2025 10:18 pm

bower wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2025 9:34 pm I've got seed of both arugulas to sow too! Getting excited about planting, since I got my seeds from Nicky's swap.
I have seed for a really interesting lettuce called Giant Blue Feather. Should be large and long lasting? Warm weather crop which doesn't bolt, so I should probably wait to sow that one.

Is Nicky (N, I assume) still running her swap?

Indeed she is. We were delayed this year by a postal strike, so seeds arrived in January.

I covered up with freeze cloth a couple of the beds of lettuce during our recent sleet, snow and 18° night and that really did make a difference. Some of the lettuce I didn’t cover and it’s alive, but looks somewhat beat up. The covered lettuce looks untouched. Honestly, the heavy, unrelenting and pounding rain does worse things to the lettuce than any frost can do. The rain shreds and pulverizes the leaves, the heavy frost, hard freeze might just burn the uncovered outer leaves.

I did plant enough lettuce in succession this year that we are having as much as we want, even with any setbacks with the pounding rain or extra cold. I’m going to keep on direct seeding more periodically as it will come up during our little winter warming trends.

bower wrote: ↑Sat Feb 01, 2025 7:58 am

Tormato wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2025 10:18 pm

bower wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2025 9:34 pm I've got seed of both arugulas to sow too! Getting excited about planting, since I got my seeds from Nicky's swap.
I have seed for a really interesting lettuce called Giant Blue Feather. Should be large and long lasting? Warm weather crop which doesn't bolt, so I should probably wait to sow that one.

Is Nicky (N, I assume) still running her swap?

Indeed she is. We were delayed this year by a postal strike, so seeds arrived in January.

I haven't seen her post in several years.

Can you PM me an online site that she visits? I'm trying to track down one of Millard Murdock's varieties (that originated in my garden). Several swap participants, here, are requesting his varieties and mine, too. She is the only one that I've ever seen who posted about it. How it wound up in Canada, and apparently nowhere else, I have no idea.

I know that it is a Canadian only swap, but I asked her, years ago , if I could join, as a one way only donation on my part. Yakoma/Yakuma/Yukoma/Yukamo (I've seen several spellings!) Giant snow pea was one of my donations. Still growing it?

And, the tomato variety that I'm looking for is Angel Heart. If she still has seeds and hasn't grown it out again, the seeds must be about a decade old, or more.

I'm sure Miss "Tape Lady" remembers me.

I might have a few seeds of Yakoma Giant left in my stash - grew it several times before we got into the 'hot long summers' and it was late here, nice giant pods but difficult to get ripe seed for planting.

Tormahto, I have Nicky's email addy if you need it. I could not send you a private msg......

Linda

might want to check out ...... the history is there for Angel Heart

https://bountyhunterseeds.com/product/a ... -tomato-2/