January in the garden - its all about LEAVES

OK, maybe it's not ALL about leaves. You can see some lemons in the background and, thanks to global warming, some nice fresh Serrano chillis in the middle of January in the Bay Area. Its just a shame that my digestive tract doesn't really appreciate these as much as I do.

But now back to the stars of the season - plants that are really difficult in the heat of summer. Plants that love moisture and dont require intense sunshine to prosper. The leaf plants.

We are talking (1) Lettuce - for example, black-seeded Simpson lettuce, very floppy leaves that provide a nice, sweet, bland background to any salad. The color really pops in any garden and livens up the place no end. Go wild - plant them in your winter flower beds for some welcome color.
Here, the green of the lettuce is set against a lovely red-leafed mustard plant. These mustards develop really large leaves - this one is called "Red Giant". Both of these plants were sown in late November, and are now being harvested for the bigger leaves, letting the smaller leaves continue to develop.

The kale in the same  bed is about 2-3 feet high and is at least one year old at this point; when the kale starts looking a little old or about to flower or is insect-infested, I just lop the tops off, and they then sprout fresh from the stump. The plant pictured is now growing on two levels - a head at the top, and a few smaller heads near the base. For crop rotation reasons, I'll probably pull it up this summer, but it looks like it could go on forever. I have about 15 plants here and there in the garden, and I harvest a good bunch every time I feel like cooking it. In between, the plant harvests itself by dropping lower, yellow leaves. My previous attempts with Laciniato kale were rather mixed, but this plain old curly kale seems to do rather well. Or maybe its just the age of the plant. I'm still going to work on the laciniato because I prefer it; one thing is that I'm adding some simple fertilizer to the greens, not just using compost, so that might be some of the improvement. The second is that the soil is getting better as the compost builds up in it. A third reason is that we are in an El Nino, and the garden is getting lots of water right now.

 Here is another batch of kale, some of these are younger and smaller. This is a good example of how I like to plant - close spacings, and mixing different varieties. Here there are kale, chard, onion and fava beans, with some lettuce, mustard, cilantro, chinese celery and parsley here and there. This confuses pests searching for their host plant. Or so they say - its certainly not foolproof. But so far this winter, I have had very few pest problems, perhaps because the insects are in hibernation.

Mushroom Time

 We have finally had some decent rains, and mushrooms are coming up all over. To the left is a Lepista Nuda, the Wood Blewit, a pretty good-tasting edible mushroom. This specimen lacks a lot of the pretty purple color that is found at the base of the stem and in the gills of young specimens. But the cap has that nice light brown, and its growing in a spot that I know produces blewits, so I fried it up. The smell is very earthy, woodsy.

 To the right, we have what I first thought might be a Caesar mushroom - supposedly very good eating, but because I dont know this species, I looked it up. Good thing I did. The Caesar mushroom is an Amanita, like the deadly Death Cap and the red/speckled white fairy-sitting-on-the-top mushroom. Accordingly, it should have been growing out of something looking like an egg (the volva). As you can see, no such stem base existed. A little searching revealed it to be a Hygrocybe

Here it is growing in the lawn. Notice the black stain on the top of the cap, and in the picture above, at the base. If you cut or bruise the stem more (as I did), it turns pretty black. In the picture above, you can also see that the cap is quite slimy, as is the stem, although you cant see this in the picture. These are pretty diagnostic of:


Hygrocybe singeri is essentially a slimy-stemmed version of Hygrocybe conica. Like its more familiar cousin, Hygrocybe singeri discolors black and has a brightly colored, conical cap. But while the stem of Hygrocybe conica is dry or faintly greasy, the stem of Hygrocybe singeri is truly slimy, making it difficult to pick.

Not generally poisonous (although some close cousins might be), but not generally edible. Tossed onto the compost heap.  The common name is "Witch's Hat".