another serving of salad

Arugula flower up close - beautiful!

June was a great salad month, now the July heat is coaxing many of my greens to flowers. The lettuce starts I bought in May produced tones – enough for me to give away bags and bags of lettuce. Now they are starting to bolt, leaving me unsure how much more I'll be able to harvest from that patch.

Fortunately, I planted my own lettuce starts in the shady spots created by the broccoli and tomatoes (which are now tall enough to provide plenty of shade). The hidden leaves are almost ready to harvest. The variety 'drunken woman' is perhaps the prettiest lettuce I've ever grown. It's producing an open rosette of slightly crinkly leaves that start green at the base and gets light red, almost rust, flecks by the tips.

Another variety, 'Gandhi' is forming lovely heads of light green, contrasting nicely with the lacinato kale it's growing beside. Arugula is thriving under the tomatoes and New Zealand spinach is almost ready to harvest. So, I'm not at risk of running out of salad greens anytime soon.

Other greens harvested include: pak choi and misome (a cross between komatsuna and tatsoi). The misome was a dark racing green and turned out much better than the pak choi, so I've planted more for the fall.

drunken woman lettuce