Growing vegetables during the Mediterranean winter is as easy as sowing/planting in October/November and harvesting from January. Last fall I sowed sugar snap peas, cima di rapa, wild chicory, salsify, purple cauliflower, radiccio, lattughino, lamb’s lettuce and fedia etc.
Lamb’s lettuce is one of the easiest and most satisfying lettuce crops – it’s not prone to disease, not a favorite with snails, robust and slow to bolt as well as tasty. This winter I tried the regular kind, Valeriana locusta (Mâche in French), as well as Fedia (Valeriana/Fedia cornucopia – Doucette d’Alger in French) from Kokopelli seeds.
For the lamb’s lettuce I just threw all the seeds I had left into the raised beds and pretty much forgot about them. The Fedia I sowed mostly under the olive tree, since it supposedly grows wild in olive groves around the Mediterranean.
The Lamb’s lettuce came up thick in December. I didn’t bother separating the seedlings but just harvested the largest ones by pulling them out with the root, giving the others space to grow – thus gradually emptying the beds. By now we’ve had many, many dinners with lamb’s lettuce as a side dish – and quite enough of it until next winter.
The Fedia also came up well, if a little later. It looks very similar to lamb’s lettuce but in a lighter green and has a similar nutty taste. It is apparently less susceptible to bolting as temperatures rise, so supposedly a year-round crop. We will see. Sooner or later it will grow nice pink flowers though and I will let it reseed freely.
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