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Post by chrysanthemum on Mar 21, 2021 16:02:01 GMT -6
I thought that this Oklahoma crowd might appreciate hearing that I grow Crawford lettuce in my Texas garden. When I was trying to figure out how to garden in this new (hot) climate, I read and read and read where to plant, when to plant, what to plant. I saw references to Crawford lettuce, but no one I talked to had ever heard of it. I couldn’t find any seeds. I wanted to grow lettuce because my children remembered “the lettuce ranch” we had in our backyard in Virginia and missed it. (We once moved soil from a raised bed forgetting that we had let lettuce go to seed there. It ended up growing in just about every bed or pot we had since we had distributed it nicely. It’s the best we’ve ever done.). Finally, I broke down and ordered seeds online, from, of all places, Virginia. I planted only three plants of Crawford lettuce last year because the seeds arrived late, and I had started several other varieties earlier in containers. The Crawford lettuce I put in the garden and didn’t harvest but just grew it out to reseed itself. At first I wasn’t sure that it had worked, but finally in December it was cool enough for shoots to pop up. (I had planted some Daikon radishes in several beds as a cover crop, so I was watering.) The winter survivors are now growing in a planter so that they can be moved to more shade later on. I have a new crop of seedlings growing now in a new bed that gets the most shade in the afternoon of all spots in my garden. We love salad in our house, so I’m hoping for some good harvests. It’s a good-tasting lettuce, mild and tender. I see it described as a Romaine, but it seems like a Bibb to me, but I’m no lettuce expert. I just like salad. Here’s an article that goes into the story behind Crawford lettuce. masterofhort.com/tag/crawford-lettuce/My new planting of lettuce this year got hit pretty hard by cutworms. By the time I deployed collars and sticks and DE, I had lost a bunch, and I still managed to lose more till I was down to only six new plants (less than half of what I wanted). A couple may grow back, but in the meantime I decided to try another small bunch of starts inside before it got too hot. (Last year my last attempt at seeding lettuce indoors never germinated because our indoor temperatures in April were too warm for lettuce, I think.). At first I had been planning to keep to just Crawford, but I decided that I wanted to grow out “Moroccan lettuce” in order to send seeds back to my mom. My mom has farmed and gardened in Virginia for almost five decades. Many years ago a taxi driver from the nearest city stopped at her farm one day. He was an immigrant from Morocco, and he had seen her sheep in the pasture and stopped to inquire about buying one for a special feast for a family celebration. He walked around the farm and loved her garden. He had apparently been a farmer and gardener in Morocco and was sadly missing the land as he lived in a small apartment in the city with his wife and baby. My mom let this man use part of her garden to grow some seeds he had brought with him from his homeland, and they carried on this relationship for years until he was able to save enough to buy a house with room for a garden. He and his family still visit and occasionally bring her their extra starter plants. One crop that he grew was a variety of leaf lettuce that held up well to the heat. My mom saved seeds from it and gave me an aspirin jar full when we moved to Texas a few years ago. We have no idea what the lettuce might really be called, but we have always referred to it as “Moroccan lettuce” because of her friend who grew the plants from seeds brought from Morocco. Recently her lettuce has failed to set seed in Virginia. She still has some seeds from some we mailed back to her, but I’m going to plan to grow some out this year to give her a more abundant supply. I’m going to have it planted close to another variety, so I’m either just going to pull that out when it bolts, or perhaps I’ll have had time to build a screened cage by then to isolate it. That’s one of my hopes of something to have on hand for seed saving. If anyone has pointers or suggestions for me, I’m all ears/eye.
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Post by macmex on Mar 21, 2021 22:48:08 GMT -6
Lettuce only needs a few feet isolation distance. Sure hope you get seed! I know I'd love to try a heat tolerant leaf lettuce sometime.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Mar 22, 2021 8:04:11 GMT -6
Chrysanthemum, thanks for posting and sharing that with us. That was a good read.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Mar 22, 2021 19:49:28 GMT -6
I love varieties where I know the stories as well.
My crop of Moroccan lettuce last year got eaten by cabbage (or was it army?) worms when I had moved it to the shade and didn’t watch it attentively. I pulled it out instead of letting it recover, so I don’t know how long it would have gone in Texas without bolting. My mom lives in Virginia, and it holds on till the end of June. I don’t know how it would fare in Oklahoma as those plains do get pretty brutally hot, I hear.
I checked my garden journal to see if I wrote down when Crawford started to bolt. I didn’t. I think it was the end of May here in South Central Texas. That’s when temperatures start being regularly in the 90s.
Macmex, I was looking at my stock of lettuce seed, and I actually have more than I realized of both types. I plant in only very small quantities because of the size of my garden, so I could share some this year if you wanted to trial a small group of plants to see how they do in your climate. The Moroccan lettuce I just seeded came up in two days, so I think it’s still plenty viable, and the Crawford lettuce was from 2019, I believe, and it did just fine for me this spring. Both plants produce rosettes of leaves. The Crawford can have quite a bit of red on the edges at times. The Moroccan has been more uniformly green. I usually treat all my lettuces as cut and come again crops. Let me know if you are interested in getting seeds, and I’ll be glad to send some.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Mar 26, 2021 20:44:26 GMT -6
My four year old and I harvested some lettuce for lunch this morning, and I thought I’d get some pictures before I cut it. The fuller, redder picture is Crawford lettuce that volunteered this winter and that survived the freeze. The other shot shows mostly new transplants, though there are a couple of slightly older plants in there as well. I thought it shows well how they redden and ruffle as they mature. I’m always impressed when plants can recover from damage. In one of the little cardboard rings (bottom right), there is new growth from the center of a plant that had been much larger and was cut down by a cutworm. It’s a cut and come again crop in more ways than one!
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Post by chrysanthemum on Mar 28, 2021 12:37:49 GMT -6
I actually have a bottle of Spinosad/BT in my laundry room from last fall. I think I used it on brassicas for cabbage worms and cucumbers for thrips (lost those anyway) and even put some in the holes of squash vine borers. My understanding is that the bacteria die in temperatures over 90 degrees, which pretty much rules out use in our environment for most of the summer. I hope it remained good in my laundry room cabinet through the winter. It’s more climate controlled than the outside, but it still has swings since we don’t heat or cool it. Thanks for the heads up about it possibly losing effectiveness in storage.
I think BT is also the active ingredient in the only garden-safe fire ant bait that I know. I had plans to buy some, but I’ll need to double check it’s temperature specifications before I do. Heat is such an issue in the summer here.
I try to be careful in my application of products, too, because of the harm to beneficials. We actually grow dill not only for pickles but also to raise swallowtails. We are also trying to encourage the native milkweed (a variety known as “antelope horn”) on our land for the Monarchs. I was seeing some of them fly through when we were working outside yesterday. I was wondering if they were wondering where all the flowers have gone.
When we moved here I was delighted to see lots of honey bees, but I feel as though they are declining. Right after the freeze, though, I saw a bunch trying to get nectar from our dead peach blossoms. I don’t know if they can do that, but they sure were working hard.
I believe I mentioned one onion flower shoot in my garden in a different thread. I decided that I’d better leave it to grow since I figured anything that I could let flower at this point should be allowed to flower since so many of the trees lost their blooms and buds.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Apr 6, 2021 14:38:58 GMT -6
I just thought I’d update this thread with a picture of my “Moroccan Lettuce.” I seeded it inside in mid to late March (the date doesn’t seem to be in my garden journal, but I started hardening it off outside on March 28th). I planted it in a planter on our front porch last weekend, and it seems to be happy in that spot. Some of the clusters have more than one plant. I’ll thin them later by eating them. My porch faces east, so it is sheltered from the hottest afternoon sun. I’ve never grown plants on it before because when I first moved here, my cousin’s wife gave me some beautiful flowers. I put them on the front porch, and the deer ate them all. This winter my husband and I rigged up an old, very long baby gate to cover the entrance so that we could perhaps keep the deer away. So far it has worked, so I’m experimenting with lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers on the porch in addition to in the garden. Right now my thermometer says that it’s 87 degrees, and it’s only going to be hotter later this week. That’s above average for the area for this time of year. It felt quite nice in the shade of the porch, though, with a good breeze blowing through.
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 15, 2021 16:40:14 GMT -6
Here are some thinnings from the Moroccan lettuce. I decided at the end of April that it was not getting enough sun on my front porch and moved it and most of the other planters to my back deck. That is a hotter area, but I can still take advantage of some shade from live oak trees. Unfortunately, the lettuce got pretty battered from some severe storms after the move. Once it perked back up, I decided that I needed to cull out some of the extra plants to reduce crowding. It made for a delicious salad to accompany one of our meals last week. My mother also had a visit from her Moroccan friend recently. He had actually been able to travel to his homeland and visit his family’s farm. He brought back a big packet of lettuce seeds for my mother. I’ll still try to grow mine out for seed, but she was so excited to have received that gift.
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 19, 2021 19:55:38 GMT -6
It does go well on sandwiches. I hoping to keep some lettuce going long enough to get my first ripe tomato for a BLT.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jun 20, 2021 14:46:23 GMT -6
We did manage to achieve a BLT. Yay! Our tomatoes are really just now starting to come in, and the lettuce is on its way out. The Crawford bolted a while ago for the most part. The Moroccan lettuce in the planter on the deck is perhaps just starting to go. I did manage to start some more successfully inside by using ice cubes in the water reservoir. I’m planning to keep these plants inside for the summer. I have the Crawford lettuce in a shady corner of my raised beds, and I’ve been hoping they’ll seed themselves there. I did, however, just apply a thick wood chip mulch to the area for the sake of my other plants, and I think that reduces the likelihood of successful self-sowing at this point. I thought therefore that I might as well begin to harvest the seeds. Here’s what the most mature plant looks like. I was thinking of just cutting off the head, putting it in a paper bag, and putting it on a rack in my garage where I have my onions. Is that a reasonable plan? Anything I need to look for in particular or be aware of? I’m still pretty new to seed saving, and I’m grateful for advice.
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Post by macmex on Jun 21, 2021 14:29:23 GMT -6
Yes, that should work. Just be sure that mice don't eat the seed. I used to place my lettuce seed and stalks in a paper sack to dry. Then, once everything was crispy I'd thresh it and try to sift out the seed, which always came with quite a bit of fluff. Then I'd store the seed in a glass jar.
At room temperature, lettuce seed is only good for two years at most. So, for long term storage I'd recommend cold storage. In a freezer, sealed in a jar, lettuce seed should be good for decades. In a fridge, sealed in a jar, I don't know for sure, but I suspect it would be good for at least 6 years.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jun 24, 2021 5:58:23 GMT -6
I did pick a couple of plant heads the other day and have had them drying. They seemed pretty dryi before I ever picked them, so I’m not sure how long to let them dry. Is there anything to look for in particular?
I store my seeds in a container in the refrigerator. It has worked well for me for years, though I did just switch from glass jars to a larger plastic bin to consolidate and save space. I’m hoping that will work as successfully.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Dec 3, 2022 14:47:17 GMT -6
I think it was last Friday morning that I went out in anticipation of a bit of rain and seeded some lettuce. Earlier in the thread, macmex gave me some advice on drying lettuce seeds. I did harvest my flower heads, put them in a bag, and hang them in my garage to dry. Then I kind of forgot about them. Thankfully nothing seems to have eaten them. I never threshed them. I just took them out last week and sprinkled them all over the bed from which I recently harvested sweet potatoes. I hadn’t been able to check on my garden for a couple of days (which is very unusual for me), so I was delighted to see this morning that all my watering before that and the last two misty days (resulting in 1/10 of an inch of rain) had germinated the seed. I took a photo of the corner where I started the sprinkling. It obviously got a pretty high concentration of seeds. At about ten o’clock in that first picture, there’s a sprouting acorn. I thought it was cool, so I took a closer shot before I removed it and tossed it toward the nearby woods.
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Post by woodeye on Dec 3, 2022 19:10:09 GMT -6
That is pretty neat, I don't remember ever seeing an acorn sprouting while still on top of the ground like that. Your lettuce is looking nice...
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Post by amyinowasso on Dec 4, 2022 10:56:11 GMT -6
I Googled Crawford lettuce. Texas A&M calls it romaine. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange calls it bib, but alludes the same origins as TAMU. Interesting.
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