Where do you order your lettuce seed? I ordered the Pinetree leaf lettuce mix, plus Simpson Elite, and Green Ice; from Swallowtail: Buttercrunch, Nevada, and Red Sails. I can't eat all that but the lettuce pictures this time of year are killing me. There is an heirloom romaine with a french name that has been tempting me. I don't usually like romaine love the butterheads and leaf lettuce. There may be some good romaine that I haven't tried.

Helen,

Here are the seed sources for the lettuce varieties:

Anuenue (batavaian/crisphead) Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Australian Yellowleaf (looseleaf) Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Ben Sheman (butterhead) Bountiful Gardens
Cardinale, Cherokee and Nevada all are Summer Crisp (crisphead/batavian) types and all are from Swallowtail Gardens.
Freckles (romaine) Peaceful Valley Farm Supply
Jericho (romaine, very heat tolerant) Renee's Garden Seeds
Merlot (looseleaf) Peaceful Valley Farm Supply
Oakleaf (looseleaf) Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Royal Oakleaf (Peaceful Valley Farm Supply)
Sea of Red (looseleaf) Renee's Garden Seeds. I also grew this last year and it is the most gorgeous lettuce I've eve grown. It literally stopped people in their tracks when they saw it. There's a photo of it at reneesgarden.com.

I got a some of these seeds at the end of season sales back in late summer and early autumn. Some varieties are new to me and some I have grown before.

Dawn

Dawn,

From where do you get your Romanesco Broccoli-Cauliflower seeds? Have you grown it before?
I first saw that in a market in Rome several years ago - it is the most beautiful, fractal vegetable I've ever seen!!
For those that are wondering what in the world...I'll include a link so you can see it for yourselves, along with a math lesson :)
Control F for cauliflower and scroll down to see a picture of it.

Sharon

Here is a link that might be useful: Romanesco Cauliflower

Sharon, I'm sure Dawn will answer, but Baker Creek has one.

Here is a link that might be useful: Baker Creek

Sharon, As Carol notes, Baker Creek has it. I got my seed last year from Bountiful Gardens. I am buying more and more seed from them every year....and their catalog just arrived today too, so who knows what I may see and decide that I "need". Lots of places carry Romanesco. I've even seen it occasionally on seed racks in some stores.

I have grown it. It grows well. Its' appearance is too spectacular for words. If you want to freak out people, grow it in the fall or spring next to purple broccoli. The two of them together are a striking combination in the garden. In my garden, especially in the cool season garden where so much of what I grow is leafy crops, I love growing Romanesco surrounded by purple veggies like purple sprouting broccoli, southern red giant mustard, ruby streaks mustard, Falstaff brussels sprouts, and Swiss Chard in every color of the rainbow. The colors in the fall, especially alongside all the dark blue-greens of Packman broccoli and some of the collards....it is just a beautiful sight to see, a real rainbow of color.

For a couple of years, back when I wasn't preserving more food yet and played around with the garden a lot just to amuse myself, I planted a rainbow garden. Every raised bed had plants with leaves, stems, flowers or fruit of that bed's color, and the beds were arranged in the same order the colors appear in the rainbow. That's how I first found Romanesco...when I was looking for green flowers and fruit for the green bed. The only bed harder than that was the blue one. I remember that I grew blue potatoes, a tomato called Blue Fruit that really was not blue at all, and blue beans....but they were for appearance only because they were poisonous. Blue flowers were a lot easier to find than blue veggies.

Dawn

Dawn,

Do you necessarily mean by this list that you'll plant all these in the spring? As a rookie gardener I've shied away from trying some of those because it is said that in Texas (I'm about an hour south of you) some of them do poorly in the spring, and stand a much better chance in the fall.

Charles

Charles, Yes, I plant them all in mid-winter through spring. When I lived in Fort Worth, some of these were fall plants only for me because Fort Worth warmed up and got too hot too early.

Up here, usually the cold nights linger a bit later most years than they did down there and I can get good crops from most cool-season crops on this list most springs. The last two years we have warmed up too early in spring for some of them though.

It is really hard for me to get good spring harvests from cauliflower or brussels sprouts in spring, so I plant them only for a fall harvest. I also have trouble with salsify and a few other odd things that need a long cool season. They do better in fall than spring, but I don't grow them much any more in either spring or fall.

Up here in southcentral OK (I am just across the river from Gainesville, TX), the key is to plant a lot of them extra early (earlier than OSU recommends) and cover them up with floating row cover that offers some freeze and frost protection. I have floating row cover in several weights, and the heaviest one gives 8 degrees of frost protection. I have found if I cover up the plants with a double layer of row cover, it often will give the plants 12 or more degrees of frost protection. Using floating row cover changed my gardening life because it allows me to plant early and not lose the plants to cold weather.

I also often lay down black plastic on top of the cool-season crop beds to warm up the soil while the air temps are still pretty cool. The warm soil can help cool-season seeds germinate more quickly than if I was trying to germinate them in cold soil.

To have a good few months with cool-season plants, I really have to push the limits here in terms of planting early, but I figure I have nothing to lose by trying. The nice thing is that if we heat up too early and the cool-season crops fail to produce well (or at all), I know I'll have another chance with the fall garden. That happened last year with snap peas and broccoli. I had a wonderful fall harvest of broccoli, but still didn't get any snap peas. As it turned out, the grasshoppers, which exist in huge numbers in our rural area most years, loved the sugar snap peas so much they ate the plants down to the ground. For a while the peas tried valiantly to regrow, but after being eaten repeatedly, they gave up. I even had them under floating row cover, but the hoppers ate their way through it too. That's never happened before. Maybe I'll have sugar snap peas this spring if the weather cooperates.

It also helps that I have a lot of space. When the garden was smaller, I pretty much had to choose between cool-season and warm-season crops in spring because there wasn't room for everything. We enlarged the garden every year until it reached its present size, so now I can grow pretty much whatever I want whenever I want. That helps.

My favorite gardening magazine is "Texas Gardener", by the way, and if you've never seen it, you might want to check it out. I find it just as useful for me here in OK as I did when I lived in TX. You wouldn't believe how many great varieties for our part of the country I've found merely by reading about them in Texas Gardener. Two of the five gardening books I'm reading this winter are from Texas too---Dr. Bill Adams' book on Growing Tomatoes and Greg Grant's Vegetable and Fruit book.

Dawn

Dawn,

Thank you for the extensive reply and all the info on other sources. I'm going to check out Texas Gardener. We have some other land near Durant, OK where I'll be growing a few things, so it's great to be able to piggyback on your experience in the area. I'm going to get the row covers too.

Do you have any recommendations on the brand of floating row cover? Maybe there are some posts from the past that deal with this. I think I may have seen some, but don't know if the manufacturer was named. I'm also interested in providing a little protection from the intense heat, and so shade cloth is something I'd like to buy.

Charles