Great news on the creasy greens front. We have tiny sprouts in our creasy greens patch.
To make a short story really long, let me update the one reader out there who may not be aware of my discovery of creasy greens.
It all started when my wife Nancy gave me a pack of creasy green seeds, which her cousin had given her because of family memories of Mom-ma and Uncle William picking creasy greens together.
At the time, I had a small space open at the upper end of my garden where nothing much would grow – because of the lack of sun – so I spread them there, raked them under and nothing happened. But I didn’t plant anything else in that space and come August, with a little rain and some cooler weather, all those creasy green seeds sprouted. I wrote a piece on them and was surprised how many people had picked or raised creasy greens. I proceeded to earn a PhD in Creasy-ology.
One of the many things I had read was that if you allowed one or two plants to mature and let them go to seed, they would restock your garden with creasy greens. I let all the plants this spring grow to about three feet with beautiful yellow blooms and they all went to seed. Finally, Nancy made me pull them up. It looked like a huge weed patch and I didn’t know at the time if the dead plants had dropped seeds, but they certainly did. The patch is now chocked full of tiny plants.
Bill Hitt, a creasy greens expert, told me that if you sowed creasy greens in August, you could harvest them by Thanksgiving. I’m a few weeks early, but I expect that by September, the greens will take off and perhaps we’ll be able to pick a mess for Thanksgiving Dinner.
I think it’s neat that a crop like this can sustain itself. I’m going to do more research on how to cook the succulent greens, but if you are a backyard gardener, a crop of creasy greens is certainly a fun vegetable to grow.