Yeah, that happens. Our spinach bolted a few days ago, and we're getting it out and cooking it off and freezing it as fast as we can. Gonna keep a couple of plants for seeds for next season, though. We might plant some mustard greens in that bed, mebbe. That, or squash.

Some of lettuce looks about ready to bolt, too. Not sure what I'll use to replace it, yet. The snow peas in that bed are about finished. Gonna use the rest for seed for next year. The carrots in that bed are doing great. It'll be awhile before the sweet potatoes start doing their thing in that bed, so it'll look kinda empty until then, if I don't get something else in there with the carrots inna meantime. Once the lettuce bolts, we'll leave a few of them in place, so we can save the seeds.

So, dumb question, but how do I know when I need to harvest my lettuce and spinach? I cheated and bought a 4 pack of each from a nice farmer up the road.

Once whatever it is bolts..how do I get the seeds? Are they in the flowers? I'm such a newbie lol. I know nothing!

You can pick the lettuce from the time it's big enough to grab a handful of leaves. Most people plant it over a few weeks, a few dozen seeds at a time, once a week. That way, it doesn't all mature at once and go to waste. Some people I know dry their extra lettuce and save it for use in soups and salads of one sort or another. The same with the spinach.

Depending on varieties, spinach and lettuce can get pretty tall before it goes to seed. A full grown spinach plant is fairly large, reaching two to three feet tall. A beautiful plant, right up until it reaches the end of its lifecycle and starts to die off. I wait until the spikes and seeds are just about dried out on the plant before I harvest them. They can produce a *lot* of seeds. You only need one or two plants in order to have enough seeds for almost everyone you know. Some varieites of spinach also need male and female plants in order to produce viable seeds.

Lettuce produces tiny little flowers, once the plant reaches full maturity. Once the flowers produce seeds, they resemble, somewhat, dandelions at a similar stage. It's a bit of effort, even tedious, to harvest lettuce seeds, though. You have to get them before they fully open up, or the seeds, like a dandelion, will be gone with the first wind. If the lettuce seeds are black when you pull them, you've got a viable seed. They are tiny, though.

You can find more info on all of this all over the internet. Just use your favorite search engine.

Personally, we use most of the extra lettuce and spinach plants in our compost heaps.

There are several things you can do to reduce the chance of broccoli bolting, but there is nothing that is 100% guaranteed.

Here's what normally works for me:

1) Grow your own transplants. You want them to be 4 to 5 weeks old when you transplant them into the ground, and you want to have 4-6 leaves on them. Any smaller or larger and they tend to bolt. Keep them consistently moist and feed them with a water soluable fertilizer, whether organic or synthetic in nature, so that they are not stressed while young. I believe that the reason purchased transplants bolt so often is that they were allowed to get too dry or too hot or too cold before you purchased them, and that's why I started raising my own.

2) Transplant at the proper time. This can be hard since we don't know what the weather will do. Broccoli is a biennial. If you have "late" cold weather after the broccoli has reached a certain size (roughly 4 to 6" tall), and the plants are exposed to a certain number of days (roughly two weeks) of temperatures in the 40s, they go into a dormant growth stall and just sit there. Then, when it warms up again, their perception is that they now are in their second season, so it is time to set seed to perpetuate their species. Thus, they bolt. You cannot control the temperatures and you cannot change the inherent nature of biennial plants, so when the temperatures are the cause of bolting.....there isn't much you can do. I tend to plant slightly later than recommended (the recommendation is to plant broccoli roughly two weeks before the average date of your last frost, but I often wait until a week after) in a year when I expect cold weather to hang on, and slightly earlier than usual in a year when I expect an early last frost and an early warm-up, like we had last year.

One reason it is so hard to get a good harvest from cole family crops here is that our cool season is too short, or as I often say, we go from too cold to too hold just too quickly for them.

3. Protect your young broccoli plants from any temperatures outside their ideal range of 40-75. Cover them up on cold nights, shade them on extra hot days. Doing this helps keep the cooler or hotter temperatures from inducing bolting. It is not necessary to do this step some years. But, most years, if you can protect the broccoli plants from the very cold and very warm temperatures, it greatly reduces the likelihood they'll bolt.

Cauliflower is treated much the same way and tends to do better here in fall than spring. My cauliflower plants are making heads, and I'm harvesting them already, but the broccoli plants haven't started forming heads yet.

Ideally, in a perfect garden in a perfect world, your broccoli will give the best harvest when it grows and matures while the temperatures are between about 40 degrees and about 75-78 degrees. Ha, ha, ha! How long do we have temperatures like that here in this state? The answer is: not long enough.

If you were growing an open-pollinated broccoli variety, you can save seeds. Just let the plant flower and leave the flowers on the plants until they are dry before you collect the seeds. If you are growing a hybrid variety, seeds saved from it likely will not come true to type and might not be worth saving.

Some varieties of broccoli tend to bolt more than others. Packman is a variety that doesn't bolt very often if I raise them from seed but they always bolt when I purchase them. In recent years I've also grown Piricicaba, which doesn't make big heads, but also doesn't bolt. In 2011 in the hottest most miserable summer most of us ever have seen here in OK, the Piricicaba was at the western end of the garden where it got afternoon shade from a pecan tree to its west, and it survived that summer, even when I didn't water for two months and almost no rain fell, and it rebounded nicely in the fall and produced until December.

This year I am trying Coronado Crown and Summer Purple in addition to Packman and Piricicaba. So far, none of them have bolted.

wbonesteel, My lettuce started bolting after we hit 93, 94 and 95 degrees. I always plant several different varieties and some of them bolt more quickly than usual, so we always start trying to use up the ones that are trying to bolt first and then the others. I also grow some lettuce in containers so I can move it to shade in an attempt to keep it going longer.

Back in Feb. or March when my winter lettuce was about to bolt, I cut it back to about 2-3" tall, dug it up and transplanted it to a new location. Doing this often puts it back into a vegetative cycle for a few more weeks. Those plants from last September's lettuce planting that I dug and moved in late winter just began bolting about 10 days ago. I've been pulling a few per day and giving them to the chickens. They don't mind eating lettuce that is bolting. The varieties that haven't bolted yet are the ones in the SummerCrisp series. I think I planted 4 varieties of Summercrisp lettuce, but even they will bolt soon. They will tolerate temperatures above 95 so last slightly longer than most other varieties but only a couple of weeks. Another variety that kind of sort of hasn't bolted is Sea of Red from Renee's Garden Seeds. It has bolted in the ground at the west end of the garden, but hasn't bolted in the containers that actually get more sun than the west end of the garden does. I do think it is about to bolt in the containers though. I hate seeing the lettuce bolt, but we've had home-grown lettuce to eat virtually non-stop since early October so I cannot complain. For our climate, that's a pretty good run.

I yanked out the sugar snap pea plants yesterday and today replaced them with the plants-in-waiting that I had ready to go into the ground: roselle, both white-flowered and blue-flowered borage, basil, a fifth planting of dill--this one is Vierling, a fifth planting of cilantro--this one is Slo-Bolt, papalo, rat-tail radishes (for their edible pods), and about a dozen leftover pepper plants, both ornamental and edible, that I hadn't found space for anywhere else. I have a wide variety of heat-loving flowering plants growing in paper cups that I will just plug into each vacant spot left when I remove the remaining heads of lettuce after they bolt. Mostly they are zinnias, about 8 or 9 different varieties, and cosmos, about 5 or 6 varieties. I've also got Yellow Bells (Tecoma Stans) and Mexican Mint Marigold just sprouting in flats and will use those to fill gaps in the garden as they appear. I also still have young basil and parsley plants to plug into holes as they develop. The basil is for us and I will use the parsley a little, but mostly it is for the swallowtail butterflies.

I always have something coming along in flats of 6 packs or paper cups so I can plug things in to fill gaps. If I don't fill gaps in the garden caused by the removing of finished plants, Mother Nature will fill those spaces with weeds that I don't want.

When I have a spot that is going to be bare for a while as we wait for something like winter squash or watermelons to start vining and filling in the space,I often sow buckwheat there. It goes from seed to flowering in about 6 weeks and attracts lots of beneficial insects. I also use Laura Bush petunias the same way. They are heat-lovers and reseed, so I have them popping up all over the garden all spring and summer long. I use them as a living mulch under some taller plants like asparagus and even tomato plants. The shade the ground and keep it cool and that helps keep the weeds down too. Plus, they look beautiful for months and months. In our garden we usually have Laura Bush petunias in bloom from about March through December. If the winter is mild, they can bloom almost the whole winter too.

Dawn

Our spinach started to bolt about a week and a half ago. We had a couple of hot days and they were off to the races. We harvested about half of it a couple of days ago, and the other half just about an a hour ago. I left two plants to go to seed. The wife decided that were were planting watermelons in that bed. We have eight or nine hills of watermelons, now. Nope. I dunno what we'll do with all of it, either.

Earlier this spring, we did transplant some of our buttercrisp volunteers from other beds and replanted them in the raised beds along the path. I'll have to keep your little trick in mind, though. That's sneaky. Sneaky is a good thing wrt gardening. ;)

As for petunias, I grew sick of them a long time ago, when I worked as a professional landscaper in AZ. A couple times a year we were planting them by the thousands. Spend eight hours a day with your face in petunias, day after day after....for a couple weeks or more at a time. Their scent still makes my stomach churn. If people want to plant petunias around me, they'll haveta plant them on my grave. :)

My broccoli hasn't bolted because I won't let it; I pick it before the buds open and turn yellow. But the heads are smaller this year than they have been in several years. When I raised Early Emerald, I routinely got heads seven to eight inches in diameter and sometimes nine inches. (I measured them) Early Dividend was almost as big, but for me Packman is only six to seven inches at best. This year some of my heads are looking mature at four to five inches. It just had too much cold weather--and not enough fertilizer. So I'm doing something I don't usually do. I am picking the central head and hoping for good side shoots. I haven't seen any cabbage worms yet. As with CPBs I guess last years vigilance with the pest control is paying off. And now that the trees to the west of the garden have leafed out, the broccoli bed gets late afternoon shade, so maybe I will get some side shoot production. And if not, I still have several packages of broccoli in the freezer from last year's bumper crop which got nary a frost after I planted them in midMarch.

In 2010 I planted a meal corn I got from George in the broccoli bed in early June and we got well over 5 gallons of dried shelled corn from 4 fifty ft rows. (I love grinding my own corn for cornbread.) In 2011 and 12 between the deer and the drought, we got maybe a quart each year. This year we're going to plant a dent corn I got from Baker's, Thompson Prolific, and hope for another good year for meal corn.

A note about lettuce seed. Not all lettuce seed is black when it is mature. Some is white, some tan. So a better way to tell if it is mature is by dryness. If you are afraid it will shatter before you can get it, you can tie a paper bag (Not plastic) over the head after the flowers fade some, bend the stem without breaking it and leave it till the seed falls into the bag. Then cut the stem, open the bag and you will know what that particular seed looks like. Although as mentioned, if it is hybrid seed, it won't come true.

I haven't seen a sign of either lettuce or spinach bolting and I haven't had enough snap peas to get any to the house yet. I did learn that I won't be planting Mammoth Melting Sugar again. They may do great in Oregon and Washington, but they were the first plants set into the garden and the last to bloom. The Sugar Snaps and Super SS are ahead of them, even the SSS planted 2 weeks after they were.

Bonesteel, so funny about your aversion to petunias and their scent. The selfseeding variety that has been wandering around my garden for 20 years is fragrant and I love it so much that I transplanted a couple plants into a hanging pot and hung it in the greenhouse last fall. I loved stepping in there and smelling them.

Heh. Seriously, there are a lot of good reasons to plant petunias. I've just had...too much of a good thing, I suppose...

Bre, attached is a short and sweet YouTube video that will show you what the flower heads look like and when to collect them. I like Dorothy' s way of collecting them best, though. Lettuce is in the same family as dandelions, and while lettuce seed heads aren't as large as dandelions (well, mine aren't) they look very similar - like little cotton balls. You want to collect them, though, before they puff out like that, or most of the seeds will have dropped or scattered.

Susan

Here is a link that might be useful: Collecting Lettuce Seeds

wbonesteel, I don't blame you for being sick of petunias. I imagine I would have gotten sick of them under similar circumstances.

The Laura Bush petunias are generally the only petunias I grow. They are derived from a native petunia and tolerate heat like nothing else I've ever seen in the petunia world. I cut them back hard in mid-summer and they rebound with a huge flush of blooms. When I grew traditional petunias, they always began to struggle with the heat beginning in late June. Laura Bush petunias laugh at the heat. I have a great appreciation for anything that tolerates our typical July and August heat with no issues, even when not irrigated. Every year when the petunias begin appearing in regular stores (often as early as February here), I want some but then I don't buy them. I know that if I am patient, the Laura Bush petunias will start blooming in late February or early March and will outlast the standard types you buy at nurseries. I used to grow Wave petunias from seed but stopped growing them because the Laura Bush petunias were so much more heat and drought-tolerant. The little flying insects adore them, so they are great for attracting pollinators to the garden.

I grow a ridiculous amount of watermelons. I currently have about 12 plants in the ground but have 12 or 15 more to plug into gaps in the garden. I grow mini Refrigerator sized melons because the large ones produce more melon than we can eat at one time. I generally grow some of my melons on trellises and on the garden fence because that keeps the melons safe from pill bugs and sow bugs. The rest roam around wherever they choose. I often underplant okra with melons. The okra gives the melons enough shade to help prevent the fruit from getting sunburned and the melons keep the ground cooler under the okra, like a living mulch.

With excess melons, we either give them away or I get out the melon ball scoop and make melon balls, which I then freeze in freezer bags. If you eat them when they are only half-thawed, they aren't mushy and the flavor is terrific either way. I also make a chilled melon soup from both muskmelons and watermelons. I've even dehydrated strips of melons, but once you remove the water, the flavor is too sweet and I didn't care for it, so don't dehydrate them any more.

The last two summers have been really hard on our poultry. We lost quite a few chickens during 112-115 degree days in 2011 when I was gone to wildfires a lot and wasn't home to monitor their conditions. After coming home from fires and finding them dead, I started leaving a misting system on for them when I left, had fans running in the chicken coops, and fed them watermelons, cantaloupes and Armenian cucumbers daily in an effort to help them stay hydrated. So, at our house, it is hard to have too many melons or cukes because I always can feed them to the chickens. I haven't lost a single chicken to heat since I implemented the misting and melons. They always had plentiful fans for air movement and lots of water, but in 2011 it wasn't enough. I've noticed when I have the misting system on that all sorts of birds from hummers to cardinals to doves and blue jays come play in the mist right along with the chickens. Having chickens is great for the compost pile, we enjoy the fresh eggs, and I have a built-in excuse to grow all the lettuce, melons and cukes I want because the chickens consume any surplus that is produced.

Some people make watermelon rind pickles, but they are not my favorite thing, so I don't make them. I'm usually too wrapped up in tomato canning and pickle-making to worry about the watermelon rinds.

Dorothy, I stopped working in the garden long enough yesterday to look inside the broccoli plants and small heads are forming. Hopefully they'll get a chance to get bigger before trying to bolt, but we're in the 90s here and staying in the mid to upper 70s at night, so bolting could occur at any time.

I harvested some cauliflower yesterday and have more to harvest today. I'm surprised it has formed mature heads faster than the broccoli, but I planted it a month earlier to give it a chance to make heads and I guess that made the difference. The brussel sprouts are forming but are very slow. If they don't hurry up, we won't get any brussels sprouts, but they were a gamble all along and I never really expect sprouts in spring, though sometimes I get them in fall.

We have broccoli worms all over and I don't have time to handpick them so I guess I'll spray the cole crops today with Bt. I don't mind them so much on broccoli plants because I can drop the broccoli heads in saltwater and the worms will float to the surface after a bit, but I don't care for holey cabbage. It will be a good cole crop year if the heat this weekend doesn't cause them to bolt. We have hit the 90s for the last two days and are expected to be in the 90s the next two days so the cole crops are right on the edge, so to speak. If they only produce small heads, I'm okay with that. We put up so much stuff last year that our freezer still has a little of everything left (and a lot of tomatoes) so we'll survive if the cole crops produce poorly, and I'm processing and freezing oodles of snap peas. I hope to finish them up today after the heat drives me inside this afternoon.

To collect seeds I like to use nylon knee-high stockings. I just pull them down over the seed head in question. They stick to the plants well so I don't have to worry about high winds blowing them off the seed heads. I'll tie them closed around a plant prone to having pests get into the seed heads---like the hollyhocks which always have some sort of weevil looking things in their seed heads.

Dawn

A thought occured to me for the broccoli newbies to tell when broccoli is going to bolt. I was in the garden of a friend the other day and her broccoli was not blooming yet, but getting close. She was waiting for the heads to get bigger, like she sees in the stores. You can't go by the size of the heads. You have to look at tightness of the florets and stems on the heads. Hers were getting loose, with the stems of the head opening up but not yet showing yellow flowers. I told her to pick the top head that day, water and fertilize and wait for the side shoots.

I said I don't let my broccoli bolt. That's because even if the heads are really small, when they loosen up a bit I pick them, and wait for side shoots in a year like this. (In most years I get big heads and rip the plants out after the main head is picked.) Someone said that the individual buds should be about the size of a grain of rice. All the buds aren't the same size at maturity, but that's a pretty good rule. I think everybody who grows broccoli ought to let one plant go through its bloom phase just so you know what the various stages look like. Then the next year you'll know when to pick.

No matter what, my broccoli plants will all be out and in the chicken pen by the end of May so the late corn can go in.

Dawn- I listened the best I could. I did pick Packman, based on your suggestion, and I planted April 5th bc you had said you held yours normally till the 1st of April. So next year, I will order some seeds from Baker's Creek and give that a go, bc I decided harvesting seeds from plants doesn't sound like my thing yet.

Mulberry- thanks for the picking tip. I will keep that in mind for next year.

My broccoli finally started forming a head this weekend but with all this heat I'm worried about it bolting. I'm a broccoli newbie so all the information in this post is extremely helpful to me. I've seen broccoli in the store that had the floret becoming loose so now I have an idea what to look for. In the forecast there's highs in the 80's, no 90's, so hopefully they can size up a little before they try bolt.

I'm wondering if I planted my broccoli too early. I planted mid-late March but with a last frost day about April 13-15. Should I have waiting at least until the first week of April? They grew pretty slow for awhile but started growing really fast the past couple of weeks. Did the early planting stunt its growth?

Cynthia

Cynthia it is possible (probable) that the early planting stunted the growth. I normally plant my broccoli the first of April here in z6b transplanting 6 week old plants that I grow myself. Last year I planted 4 week old plants in midMarch because it was so WARM. Had a great harvest last year. This year not so much as I said. I planted in early April this year--but we got a fairly hard freeze every week until May when we got a light frost on the 3rd. Broccoli unlike cabbage, does better at warmer temps--but not hot. It's a diva, definitely. Good luck with them.

Momofsteel, broccoli is one of those plants that I prefer to use hybrids. That's because the DTM (days to maturity) is shorter for hybrids. Packman, a reliable producer here, has a very short DTM. It is hybrid. You will only find open pollinated seed at Baker's.

Cyntha, I am new to the broccoli world also. This is my second or 3rd year for starting from seed on broccoli and dont have things down Pat, so I am having problems also. My broccoli is not bolting yet, but it is undersized. I am blaming some of that on this Yo-yo spring we have had.

This is my largest Packman head, and my largest Blues Chinese cabbage head.

Madge has been picking the heads a little sooner than I would like, but they are good anyway and we have to fight the insects for them.

Larry