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Growing Mondays
Use salad greens as weed control; Let lettuce seed!
Jo Hunter Adams
September 30, 2024
Hi! I'm Jo, writing from Heart & Soil homestead, a 1-acre homestead in the Far South of Cape Town, South Africa. Every week I share inspiration and education for your growing journey. Thanks so much for reading!
Welcome to Growing Mondays, where I share ideas to help you grow edible and medicinal plants.
Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
Interplant small veg (lettuce) between large veg (tomatoes, brinjals, peppers)
If you, like me, don’t like empty space, plant lettuce or basil between your brinjals, tomatoes, and peppers.
I space brinjals 40cm apart, in rows 40cm apart. This means I can plant around 16 leaf lettuce 10cm apart to fill in the space between four brinjals in a block. You can get a sense of how this looks, in the picture above.
Each lettuce can be cut about three times before the weather gets a bit hot and the brinjal needs its space. Each lettuce cut is about ½ a large salad, which means in each block of 16 lettuce (4 brinjal), you get 8 salads X 3 = 24 salads per block. I have 20 brinjals in this row, which means around 100 salads in otherwise wasted space, which is just about perfect.
Second cut
Lettuce is one of the more expensive seeds out there, and one of the easiest seeds to save, if you don’t mind a bit of chaff. Let some lettuce go to seed in your pathways, and store some for sowing later. The pathway lettuce are often a source of mini-green for us, especially in the heat of summer. We harvest them young and stay in lettuce for longer…
Cos lettuce grown in blocks, where I don’t grow a summer crop, so they can take all the time they need to make seed.
I made a mistake! The seed swap was scheduled at the same time as the Fishhoek Garden Expo and Flower show. We'll cancel it for now, and see about another date.
Summer Growing Part 2 Sunday 3 November, 10-11:30 While the first summer veg workshop was to get you prepped, the second part will look at how things are growing, check what we can improve, and make plans for the rest of the season. It’ll be a great time to see how I think about the summer growing season, and how our homestead adapts depending on the weather.
Lots and lots of seed for the pathways…
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