Perennial Greens (was Training our taste buds )

[Guest guest]

Hi Roseta,

I too am in SoCal, so if we keep tabs from time to time, it could be

helpful. I'm letting my bolting red and lacinato kale go as they

will, with an eye to collecting the seeds and then cutting them back.

I notice that alot of side-shoots grow from the thickenening stems of

established kale plants, producing alot of new growth and leaves. I

haven't noticed that the leaves from the bolting kale plants are any

less edible, either. Though the plants are less-elegant looking, I

like the hummingbirds and big black bees coming around after them.

 

I also have a small patch of something called " perpetual spinach "

which is a kind of swiss chard, maybe a good switch planting from all

my Brassica species. These plants took a long while, 3 or 4 months, to

get started but have gotten to be very vigorous and productive with no

bolting. Each 10 inch plant is putting out 5 or 6 new hand-sized

pale-green leaves a week, and the stems are starting to grow long,

putting my actual (Springer) spinach to shame! The taste is rather

bland though, not particularly noticeable, good or bad, raw or cooked.

but very nutritious, from what I can glean from the calorie-counting

sites.

 

I've got some Georgia collard seeds, and am prepping a spot for a

little patch, hopefully with purslane, sorrel and more perpetual and

New Zealand spinach growing lover down as a kind of ground cover. I

understand that the collards grow pretty high and well, maybe year

round, but may need to be replaced once or twice a year (??).

 

I've used seeds from Bountiful Gardens OP site, SeedSavers.Org, Park

Seeds. John Scheepers and now Territorial Seeds website. Park seeds

advertise and spam too much but the seeds were mostly good even when

" on sale " at the end of a season. Scheepers seeds have been generous

amounts and high quality. I like the many odd varieties and philosophy

of the Bountiful Gardens site, the seeds are good, and the prices

often seem so, but a number of the descriptions are misleading and

some of the seed counts seem a little stingy. I just bought some BT

pesticide for my diamond-back moths from Territorial seeds -- along

with some purslane and some other seeds that I can't comment on

because they just got started, but fast service and they always tell

you how much seed, in weight and number, for your $$.

 

There's a new bird in my yard, the Black-Phoebe, a flycatcher! They

are very plentiful and all the time swooping around. I saw some

before, but never so many. They try to catch the moths too!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Phoebe

 

Take care,

 

Slim

 

 

, " rosetalleo " <rosetalleo

wrote:

>

> Slim, thanks for the information. You must live in warm weather too?

>

> I tasted New Zealand spinach back when I lived in Oz. I was unaware

it did better in warm

> weather, so I will try this when i get seed. We did get some of the

green wave mustard

> but have not planted yet, will do in the fall. I got some mustards

planted in the winter but

> I bought seeds from a bad supplier (Horizon seeds, stay away from

them). so only one or

> two sprouted, and i got more greens from my volunteer lettuce!

>

> Collards apparently really like warm weather and I have lots of

collards going. I planted

> too much and mixed the seed with red and lacinato kales so I am

thinning it and letting

> the kale get larger. I even got gai lan to grow for me this year!

and bok choi too. It is

> getting too warm for them though, so they will find themselves in a

dish soon....our red

> russian kale flowered with nice yellow flowers and we cut them,

trying to get it to stay

> perennial and give us more leaves, let's see what happens...we have

been picking the kale

> weekly for about 16 months now. That is a lot of kale out of one

patch!

>

> Roseta

>