Snoskred – Life in the Country

I kinda like this photo.

As soon as I take the iphone out she stops posing in whatever cute pose I wanted to take the photo of, so I keep ending up with shots like this

I have never been a fan of regular lettuce. I prefer baby spinach or rocket. One day at the garden centre I found Mizuna which is apparently another kind of lettuce but I’d never heard of it, so I thought I would give it a try.

On the 11th of November this is little kitty sniffing them to see whether they are worth chomping on. She has a thing for grass and things that look like grass but she chose not to chew at these. They’d been in the ground for maybe a week.

I fed some to the chickens over the following days, picking from the centre of the plant as I hoped they would bush outwards a bit. This apparently encouraged them to flower. Here they are on the 22nd November -

And here they are just 3 days later on the 25th –

I had no idea they would flower. They taste great, and have the advantage of growing quickly and also tall away from the ground so they are easy to keep dirt free and rinse off when it is time to eat them.

According to Wikipedia they are resistant to cold and grown in winter in Japan, and you can eat them hot or cold. I’ll keep an eye out for them at the garden place and if I see more I’ll be buying them to plant in some of the large pots I have which are plantless. I think Mizuna would do great in a pot as well as in the garden and if it is close to the back door I can just pop out and cut some for salad.

The chooks absolutely love it – probably it is their second favourite green thing to eat after Kale.

This beetroot apparently has a complaint about the kitty climber planks we put over the top of it. But it has found a way to get to the sun in any case.

I discovered a mutant cauliflower. Well all of my cauliflowers have pretty much been weird but this one certainly takes the cake so far. I’m not growing them for me – they are for the chooks and the chooks don’t seem to mind the oddness, or the caterpillars which have (irritatingly) overtaken these plants.

We had a couple of super hot days and then quite a bit of rain. The plants seem to be loving it, I can see real differences between photos I took on Friday and photos I took today.