Mâche or corn salad, an easy-to-grow spinach substitute

The honeysuckle family (Caprifoliaceae) contains a single edible crop—mâche or corn salad.

When we wrote Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida, we arranged the crops by plant family (not the alphabet) so readers could have a better grasp on how to rotate crops to reduce problems with pests and to even out soil depletion and enrichment. There were not many families with only one crop. Corn salad fell into this category.

Grow corn salad (center row) along with other cool-weather crops. Here it's growing with some black-seeded Simpson lettuce, a reddish lettuce and dill. 

Here the corn salad is growing in a wide row with red-stemmed spinach
and next to some garlic.

Mâche or corn salad (Valerianella spp) is a fast growing cool weather vegetable with a mild spinach taste. A European weed, it often grows in wheat fields and peasants foraged it for their salads. The British sometimes call wheat corn, so it was the salad in the cornfield. There are a couple of different species. It's best to choose those with most heat tolerance.

Since it is basically a weed, it has a high germination rate. In both of these photos, I probably planted it a little too densely, but the quality was not affected.

Review: The Water-Saving Garden

Buy a copy on Amazon

When Pan Penick asked me to review her new book, I was somewhat reluctant knowing that it was written for gardeners in the whole country and not just Florida. But once I received her gorgeous book, I was entranced by all her cool water-saving ideas and innovative designs.

Florida is NOT a desert!

First let me say that since Florida averages 50 to 60 inches of rainfall annually, it is not a desert and so we cannot have xeriscapes. The stone-scaping that works so well in arid climates, doesn't work that well here. Our climate and rainfall ensures that any bed of stone will be filled with weeds before too long. On the other hand, we do have a 7-month dry season which can make us feel like we live in a desert. So we DO need water-saving ideas.