It’s a cool season lettuce best grown for spring and autumn harvesting
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Q. We are a large family of salad lovers. Butterheads are our favourite lettuces. To satisfy this preference and to produce as much of our best-liked kind of lettuce as possible, I am looking for butterhead varieties that produce large, high quality heads. Do any from your lettuce growing experiences come to mind?
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A. The butterhead lettuce variety that springs immediately to mind is Hilde, a large butterhead that Dutch friends who raised six children recommended to me.
Listings from different seed companies vary from year to year. Currently, I see Hilde II Improved is available from William Dam Seeds, who describe it as the “Original Dutch butterhead lettuce. Giant white type. Time-proven butterhead produces large, light green heads with creamy green insides. Soft buttery texture.”
Hilde is a cool season lettuce best grown for spring and autumn harvesting, which means early sowing for spring harvesting and a midsummer to late summer sowing for fall and early winter harvesting. Hilde is hardy enough to be grown as a winter lettuce, along with other cold-tolerant types like Winter Density, Rouge d’hiver and Cimmaron — all romaine lettuces.
Lettuces classed as “hardy” still need covering in cold weather, and they are unlikely, even under tunnelling and extra covers, to survive temperatures below -5 C.
Q. I would like to make a first try at growing dry beans, specifically black beans. If you have grown any, I’d appreciate some tips on growing them.
A. Two years ago I grew a Salt Spring Seeds variety called Black Cocoa. I’d had my eye on this variety for a while, because I’d heard that they were particularly flavourful.
When the spring weather had become consistently warm, I planted the seeds along an edge of a sunny vegetable plot. They all germinated perfectly and the plants grew without a hitch. In August, the pods began drying off and by the third week of the month the pods were fully dried and ready to release their shiny little beans.