Three More Unusual Vegetables

A few weeks ago I had a post about Achocha, a vegetable the Inca are supposed to have eaten. I grew several other uncommon vegetables this year. Some of them are not very well known simply because they don't deserve to be, but others I am pleased to have discovered. Here are descriptions of three vegetables new to me.

Little watermelon

Kagraner Summer 2

You might well wonder what is Kagraner Sommer 2? It is the name of my favourite head lettuce. It is a type of lettuce known as Butterhead (or Bibb, or Boston). It makes a loose head, that can reach the size of an iceberg lettuce, the most common head lettuce sold in North American grocery stores, but the leaves are much greener, more tasty and somehow more substantial, without being tough. Here is how I grow them.

Kagraner Sommer 2

Heirloom Tomato Review

Late August is a time of the year when you can enjoy tomatoes fresh from the garden. This year, I have tried different varieties, all of them open-pollinated, some determinate, some indeterminate. Here is an evaluation of these new-for-me varieties.

Feast or famine

Growing your own vegetables usually means having none or too many. Our pole beans are now in full production. We had visitors last week, and we were not able to pick beans when they should have been picked.  Now some of them are too big, which means sorting.

Pole beans

Lemon

This post is called Lemon, but it is actually about a cucumber. A heritage or heirloom cucumber that is called Lemon. It is not difficult to guess how it got this name, since it looks much more like a lemon than a cucumber.  But it is slightly bigger than a lemon.

Spuds & Companion Planting

Potatoes are ripe. We grow various varieties. Some do better than others. In our garden you have to make sure to pick them when the soil is rather dry, since our clayish soil is very sticky and tends to stick to the potatoes when wet. You can always wash them, but washed potatoes do not keep as well as those that are left unwashed. The ones I like best are the fingerlings.

Fingerling

Bean Strategies

The vegetable I like best to grow is pole beans. I am not quite sure why, but these Jack-in-the-bean-stalk plants, which are so productive, have a definite attraction for me. The growing season is rather short in our zone 5 garden, so I have to make sure I put all the odds on my side to get as good a crop as possible and have green beans available for the longest period of time. Here is how I grow them.

Pole beans in August

Making Do

After three weeks of sunshine, it has now been raining steadily for three days and nights. Not only is the garden soaked, in some places the paths between the raised beds are flooded (this is the main reason why the beds are raised). Such weather provides an opportunity to do indoor jobs and perhaps some reading.

I am just as interested in gardening books as I am in gardening, and in my opinion, some of the most interesting and practical books, are the ones that were published roughly between 1930 and 1960. Read more to see why.

Poles and supports

While it is far too early for planting tomatoes and beans, it is not too early to make sure you have everything ready when time comes to bring out the tomato plants and plant the beans.  These last few days I have been busy setting up supports for them.

Tête-à-tête daffodils

Lettuce We Grow

Because we eat a lot of lettuce, we grow a lot. We have tried numerous varieties over the years, and here are the ones which we like best and which do best at Roche Fleurie.

Our “basic” lettuce, the one we seed regularly to make sure we always have some available and on which we rely throughout the growing season, is a German variety called Kagraner Sommer 2. It is a Bibb or Butterhead type lettuce (Lactuca sativa var. capitata), which means that it makes a head but, in my experience, not a very big one, and is much looser than, say, that of Iceberg lettuce. The colour is yellow green. It is a delicious lettuce and very slow to bolt.