What I planted for fall/winter

Friday, September 14, 2012

Salad burnet, a perennial green

For our fall and winter garden, I went with kale, cabbage, mustard greens, lettuce, spinach and Patience dock.

I planted a few varieties of kale-Winter born which is extremely cold hardy, scarlet kale which is a beautiful maroon, Tuscan or dinosaur kale which has a great texture, dark color, and is very tasty and Sea Kale, a perennial blue green kale that is tasty when small leaved in salads and a nutty cabbage flavor when steamed or sautéed.

For cabbage, I planted Northern lights ornamental cabbage (green with either white, maroon, or pink centers) and Savoy which is kind of a combo between a loose leaf cabbage and the traditional cabbage.

In the lettuce category I planted two butterheads-Speckles and North Pole, two romaines-Winter Density and Rouge d’Hiver, a loose leaf-Winterwunder.

To round out the greens, I planted Ruby Streaks mustard which has lacy red leaves, Space hybrid spinach, and Patience dock a long-lived, deep rotted perennial.  It has a similar flavor to spinach and can become a nuisance if you don’t remove the seed stalks that appear in mid-summer.

I love adding as many perennial greens as possible.  They are typically the first to come up in spring and the last to go in winter.  Perennial greens tend to be sweetest in cool weather.

Other perennial greens growing in our garden-chard, French sorrel, blood-veined sorrel, corn salad, salad burnet, purslane, peppery arugula, chives, Egyptian walking onions, dandelions, celery.