Leaf of the week – May King

It’s the quintessential lettuce – bright green, buttery and delicious – just like the longed for lettuce in the story of Rapunzel. May King is delighting us all with its perfectly formed leaves and super abundance in the polytunnel at our Clissold Park site. This week we harvested a whopping 1.8kg from a bed a mere 2.5 metres long. And this from a stretch of soil that had given us 1.3kg a week before. It’s amazing what a little Spring heat can do!

May King is a butterhead variety and you can pick off the outer leaves to give a good continuous harvest. These were planted last autumn and have overwintered rather nicely in the protected environment of the polytunnel.

And sow it begins…

Couldn’t resist that heading as we start to sow this year’s seeds. If you head out to any of our sites, you’ll find a vast array of seeds beginning to do their thing on the graveled benches on which we do the propagation. The benches are essentially tables with a shallow lip which we’ve lined with plastic and have put a load of gravel. We fill this up with water so the seed trays sit on top of the gravel and can draw the water up as they need it, it acts like a mini-reservoir. This helps keep the water levels right for the precious vulnerable seedlings. We try to get to the sites as often as possible to tend to them, but it’s a little tricky when you can’t make it every day.

The orache seedlings make a first appearance next to the turnip tops…

This year the propagation operation is bigger than ever. With the new sites at the Tree Nursery and St Michael’s the tables are truly groaning under the weight of future salad plants. We’ve done a central seed order too, for the urban market gardens and the growing Patchwork Farm, which is proving to be an interesting exercise in logistics – how to make sure that the seeds you need are where you want them when you need them? Just another of the not-unsolvable but remarkable challenges of having multiple sites!