Growing Agretti

Got some agretti seeds from Bountiful Gardens. They look like little bits of cork and the seed pack advises you to plant in succession until June, when seed viability "becomes questionable."

Ominous. I know myself well enough to suspect I won't be succession planting coherently enough to use all the seeds by June, so I started them last weekend in one of the small SIPs made from an old spinach container, drink bottle, and some tubing. We wrote about how to make these before our camping adventure last fall.

The growing medium is damp peat and coir with a little perlite, to ensure wicking.

On go the agretti seeds,

followed by a gentle tucking in

Then I wrapped the SIP in plastic and set it on a warming mat in the southern light. In the foreground, another SIP with the two patio tomatoes Debbie brought us a few weeks back. Everyone's happy being sub-irrigated.

From my reading, agretti is a little bit salty, a little bit sour, and one of those greens you can use in myriad ways: raw, our traditional steam, olive oil, lemon juice, and dijon, or the saute preparation our friends at Root Simple use for borage, already growing in profusion in their yard (envious).

Seeds from Italy has more on agretti.

How about this agretti cheesecake? I'm already envisioning Bruce's flock providing the eggs for it.

 

We'll transplant some of the agretti into SIPs on the roof in a few weeks. Others will go into our small in-ground bed, with few left over to share.