Lettuce volunteer Big Food, Big Garden, Big Life


Kagraner Sommer lettuce: “58 days — It is a good mid-season variety as it is slow to bolt in the summer heat. Originally from Germany, the heads are light green and medium sized. Each packet contains one gram, which is approximately 500 to 600 seeds.” Seed from Victory Seeds.

Oakleaf lettuce: I’ve had one large packet of these seeds for years and they keep germinating!

Butterhead Buttercrunch lettuce: “65 days. Buttercrunch is a vigorous grower with a creamy yellow interior, buttery, flavor and tender texture. Small heads are perfect for a single-serve salad. Loves moist but not soggy soil. The compact size makes it a good container variety.” Seed from Botanical Interests

Each spring, I plant my salad garden in the same raised planters. It’s intense! As in, “intensive gardening”– getting the most out of a given space: lettuce, celery, radishes, spinach, rat-tail radishes, fall radishes, cherry tomatoes, micro-greens, basil, oregano, garden cress, zinnias… .

Each spring, I look forward to seeing what’s going to volunteer in my salad garden.

Basil volunteers among the red leaf lettuce.

A single rat-tail radish volunteering to extend the radish season. Trust me. One is all we need!

Rat-tail radishes are interesting. The roots get huge– but it’s not the root that’s edible! It’s the seed pods which mature just after it’s gotten too hot for traditional spring radish seeds to germinate.


Last year’s celery gone to seed.

Celery, too, is interesting. From the introduction to growing celery at Gardening Know How:

Growing celery is generally considered to be the ultimate vegetable gardening challenge. It has a very long growing season but a very low tolerance for both heat and cold. There is not much flavor difference between the home grown variety and the store bought variety so most gardeners grow a celery plant purely for the challenge it poses. Read on to find out more about the best way to grow celery in your garden. [My emphasis]

Poppycock! Have you tasted home grown celery? It is far superior to store bought. I will grant that celery is difficult to start inside from seed. And it can collapse in the Mississippi heat. And it does like a lot of peat in the soil. But come on! The “ultimate vegetable gardening challenge”? The celery in the photo, above, volunteered last year and over-wintered. It’s seeds will no doubt volunteer later this summer, and those plants will over-winter so long as I mulch the bed well, and while all of this is going on, we will be eating homegrown celery.