Cooking Greens in September

Cooking Greens to Harvest in Central Virginia in September

Chard and senposai are available here all month (and longer).

Some of the unusual warm weather cooking greens, such as Malabar Spinach, sweet potato vine tips, okra leaves, molokhia (Egyptian spinach, related to okra), manihot (aibika) are still edible in early September. See the July and August posts for more about those.

Yukina savoy, komatsuna, Maruba Santoh, pak choy, Tokyo Bekana and Chinese cabbage, can be available throughout September, if they were sown in late June or early July.

At last it is the season here for delicious new cooking greens! Broccoli (from 9/10), cauliflower (from 9/15), beet greens (from 9/20), cabbage (from 9/25), turnip greens (from 9/25), and collards from late September.

We may still have spring cabbage in the cooler, if we had a good harvest.

Cooking Greens to Sow in Central Virginia in September

September is a busy month for sowing greens outdoors. We want the crops to be established before cold weather, so they can make growth throughout the winter whenever it’s warm enough (anything above 40F (4.4C) is warm enough for kale, spinach and lettuce to grow a bit.).

We also prepare and plant our first hoophouse bed. That post is  an excerpt from The Year-Round Hoophouse © Pam Dawling and New Society Publishers.

Here’s our day-by-day schedule for both outdoors and our hoophouse:

• September 6: Direct sow in the hoophouse: spinach #1, tatsoi, Bulls Blood beets
• September 7: Last date for first round of kale sowings outdoors.
• By September 15: Sow outdoors if not done yet: kohlrabi, kale and collards; Hoop and net.
• Early-mid September: Sow spinach #1 outdoors (pre-sprouted). We have trialed various spinach varieties for our hoophouse and for outdoors, and our current favorites are Reflect (outdoors) and Acadia (both outdoors and in the hoophouse).
• September 15: our first round of nursery sowings for the hoophouse: pak choy, Chinese cabbage, Yukina Savoy, Tokyo bekana, chard, (as well as lettuce and frilly mustards for salad mixes). Two or three times in September we sow crops in an outdoor bed to be bare-root transplanted at about 3 weeks old into newly prepared hoophouse beds. This gives the warm weather hoophouse crops (including cover crops) longer to grow, and also gives the seeds cooler conditions to germinate in. Because the pest pressure outdoors is fierce at that time of year, we hoop and net these very important plants. Our rough formula for all transplanted fall brassicas is to sow around a foot (30 cm) of seed row for every 12’–15’ (3.6–4.6 m) of crop row, aiming for three seeds per inch (about 1 cm apart).
• September 15 is our last date for resowing kale outdoors, if we are to get any winter harvests from it.
• Mid-September: Sow spinach in the coldframes. In spring we will use the coldframes to harden off seedlings, but over the winter they make a nice sheltered space to grow more spinach. We will cover the coldframes in the middle of winter. An advantage of using the coldframes for spinach is that the area around the frames is all mulched, and accessible regardless of the weather.
• By mid-September: Sow turnips outdoors, hoop and net them.
• September 20-30: Sow spinach #2 outdoors for spring harvest. The goal here is to provide a succession of spinach harvests. This later sowing will size up in early spring and give good harvests before the newly transplanted spring spinach, and be better quality and more abundant than the beds sown in early September.
• September 24: nursery sowings #2 for the hoophouse: we first -resow any failed #1 sowings; and also sow Red Russian kale, White Russian kale, senposai, Yukina Savoy, Frilly Mustards, and more lettuce. We hoop and net.
• Late September: Sow Eat-All Greens See the Special Topic for September below.
• September 30: As needed we resow any of the hoophouse transplants that we are short of.

Cooking Greens to Transplant in Central Virginia in September

In early September, we transplant collards and kale if we didn’t finish in August.

We only grow Vates kale, a very cold-hardy dwarf Scotch curled type outdoors. When the kale is about 3-4 weeks old, we use plants from any of the beds to fill out any other (if we have enough spare plants). We resow if the survival rate is really poor. We eat any extra plants.

In late September, we finish the kale gap-filling. From then on, what we see is what we’ll get.

Other Cooking Greens Tasks in Central Virginia in September

Weed and thin kale to 12”

To improve spinach seed germination we have put spinach seeds in the freezer in mid-August or earlier (at least two weeks). We reclaim it from the freezer and let the waterproof container warn up to ambient temperatures before opening it. Otherwise condensation will land on the seeds and ruin them for future sowings.

To presprout spinach, measure the required amount of seed, put it in a jar and cover with water overnight. Fit a mesh screen lid (a piece of window screen held on a Mason jar by the metal band works well, although you can buy longer-lasting metal or plastic mesh lids too. In the morning, strain off the water, turn the jar on its side, shake out the seeds to lie along the side of the jar, and lay the jar in the fridge. Once a day, give the jar a quarter turn to shuffle the seeds and even out the moisture. You are not growing bean sprouts, and you do not need to rinse and drain the spinach seeds. After 6 or 7 days, the seeds will have sprouted enough to plant by hand. Perhaps spread the seeds to dry for an hour on a tray or a cloth. If the seeds stick together as you start to plant, mix in a little dry, inert, absorbent material like uncooked corn grits, bran or oatmeal (but not sticky bread flour).

Beet seeds can also be presprouted, but a bit more care is needed, as it is easy to drown beet seeds. Soak them in water for only an hour or two, and do not use much more water than needed. I realize that’s a tall order the first time you do this, as you won’t know how much is too much! Err on the side of caution! Don’t let the sprouts grow very long, as they are brittle. A short red sprout is all you need.

Special Cooking Greens Topic for September: Eat-All Greens

I introduced the topic of Virginian Eat-All Greens in my blog in November 2015.

Carol Deppe, in her delightful book The Tao of Vegetable Gardening explained the concept and the practice of growing Eat-All Greens. Carol grows these by broadcasting seed of one of her carefully chosen greens crops in a small patch. When it reaches 12″ tall, she cuts the top 9″ off for cooking, leaving the tough-stemmed lower part, perhaps for a second cut, or to return to the soil. I wanted to try this idea in Virginia, where the climate is fairly different from the Pacific Northwest where Carol lives. I decided fall was a promising time of year to try this scheme, and we sowed some on September 16 that year. We hadn’t planned ahead, and didn’t have the perfect range of seeds (see The Tao of Vegetable Gardening for that). We experimented with seeds we had on hand or could get quickly, and we sowed in rows rather than broadcast, because we knew we had a lot of weed seeds in the soil.

Carol Deppe has an article on How to Easily Grow High-Yielding Greens in Mother Earth News Feb/March 2016, which you can read about here

We harvested in October and for the third time on 11/3, and several more times. By December 22, I was noting “Our Eat-All Greens are still alive, if not exactly thriving. The peas have been harvested to death; the kohlrabi, beets and chards are never going to amount to anything; some of the more tender Asian mustard greens are showing some frost damage. On 12/10 we made one last crew foray to harvest – not greens, but roots!” We harvested two and half buckets of radishes and 5 gallons of turnips before the end of the year. I’m not sure how many harvests of cooking greens we’d had, but it felt plentiful..

On January 12 I noted: “We had a low temperature of 6F on January 5th. Not much [of the Eat-All Greens patch] is left alive. Always enthusiastic to keep updating my list of cold-hardy winter vegetable crops, I took my notebook and walked the rows a few days later.”

I wrote up our Eat-All Greens for Growing for Market magazine and you can read it in the January 2016 issue. We thoroughly enjoyed the experiment, and the sight of all those rows of abundant greens in the late fall and early winter.