On another form of season extension

Good morning, sunshine!

There is a trick you can try with cabbage and lettuce to extend the season of those plants. If you chop the head off in the middle of the neck, the plants will sometimes produce little mini-heads. I do this quite often with lettuce before it starts bolting and getting all bitter and nasty. I will extend the plantings a good two to three weeks this way. It works with any kind of lettuce, too.

Last August was an awfully wet one here, so I lost all of my cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower, carrots and second planting of onions. In my usual Scarlett O’Hara “I’ll never go hungry again–nor any of my folks” fashion, I have planted plenty of cabbage (and the rest) this year, all planted early too, with an eye to harvesting much of it before the rains fall again. (I also trenched all the way around the garden and buried perforated drain pipe, too, as another form of insurance, and I deepened all the beds; let’s just say nobody can throw dirt around like I can.)

Ouch!

So this is a (for me) summer cabbage, a savoy, Des Vertus, seeded 2/24, into the greenhouse 4/1 and into the ground around 5/1. I tend to crowd them, and I harvest the center (larger) ones first to compensate. I’ll be making a lovely slaw tonight with some tarragon vinegar and spring onions. Here’s the chopping, and oops I chopped too low, but left enough leaves for photosynthesis. You can kind of see a little bud at the leaf joint. About the end of August or so, I should have three or four mini-heads about the size of a tennis ball to harvest. Yum!