MNN - Mother Nature Network

Farmer D: See all that milk coming off the stem? That’s a sign of bitterness in the lettuce, when it’s real milky like that. So what’s going to happen when it bolts which this is -- it’s starting to flower, it sends up a stalk -- it’s good to harvest the whole plant. When lettuce starts to send a stalk up the middle like that, that’s what happens with it’s bolting. And basically what it’s doing is it’s got to a cycle in its maturation where it wants to make seeds, it wants to go to flower. And we could let these lettuces go to seed, there’s nothing wrong with that, if you want to save seeds off of a lettuce. You are going to lose space in the garden for another six weeks but this will produce enough seeds to grow another 500 to 1,000 heads of lettuce. And onions and lettuce are a good companion plant. One of the things you can do while planting things like onions and lettuce together is you can maximize the amount of stuff you can grow in a small space. The onions grow upright and they don’t -- and the lettuce spreads out so they don’t really compete with each other. They are happy to grow together, and onions are good for deterring bugs. Sunflowers, they actually are the reason why I decided to plant cucumbers in this bed. Because cucumbers and sunflowers are companion plants. They’ll climb up the sunflowers so they get their own little trellis. These coconut pots are great because you really don’t have to take the plant out of the pot which is going to mean a lot less stress on the plant. So I’m going to actually stick this whole pot in the hole and just going to leave it right in there. I’m going to make it a little bit deeper because that way the cucumber will be -- won't be blowing in the wind quite so much. Very gentle. Most plants, you plant them at what you call the net. These are the [indistinct], these two generic-looking leaves and then these true leaves are the leaves that look like the actual plant. And the net is kind of right here below those. So we couldn’t go any deeper down to the net. So you know what I will do at this point is I will push them down and fill them up a little bit more.