Bolt!

Peter recently asked me what bolting is all about in the garden. The picture above's what it looks like when bok choy bolts. And my radishes that are bolting look the same, only some have lilac or lavendar colored blooms. The birds were all over the blooms today - picking of bugs, or eating the flowers themselves?

Bolting is pretty much a bad thing for gardeners (unless it's cilantro and you want coriander). It usually happens when the weather gets warmer than the "ideal growing temperature" for a plant I guess... Cool weather plants like the lettuces, cabbages, spinaches, bok choy, broccoli and many other greens didn't like that heat wave we had recently. I planted three different varieties of bok choy this year - green, purple and white. The dwarf greens were the first to bolt - I never really even got to harvest any. The purple I got to enjoy a little bit of, but they also bolted early thanks to the high temperatures. The white-stemmed is holding out still.

When a plant "bolts", it basically seems to go from the stage where we humans think it's a tasty vegetable or herb, to something distasteful - and usually bitter I believe. When you see a radish or head of lettuce in the grocery store, you'd never realize they're capable of putting out a 3+ foot tall stalk from the center, and will grow flowers and then seedpods from that stalk. There's no way I'd consider eating these plants that have obviously bolted - I've tasted them too many times at the beginning stages of bolting, and it's not a good thing.

I look at it like this - plants live to reproduce (ok, that covers all life pretty much, right?). They have this stage of their life where they're building up their body mass, storing nutrients, etc. And then suddenly something triggers them (high heat, change in day length, trauma), and the plant says "oh shit!" and realizes it's days are numbered - at which point it switches gears, stops building up it's body, and puts all that yummy tasty energy into reproduction - setting out seed to create some heirs.

As I said - this is how *I* look at it, and is VERY oversimplified at that. It's been years since I've had any biology or botany classes, so don't hold me to this.

Oh, and when I have a scrawny little plant like a tomato I've started from seed, still trapped in it's Dixie cup, wondering why it never got potted up into a larger pot, or put in the ground, and it starts blooming and producing ugly, hard little tomatoes faster than ANY of the ones cranking out lush growth in the ground, I figure that's what's going on here as well. The plant says "clearly I'm not going to get an ideal life, so screw this - I better make some seeds before I die."

Again, I could be wrong...but that's my interpretation of bolting.

As for cilantro - it's great as a leafy herb in salsa, right? But coriander, what we call the seeds of the cilantro plant, are also very good in cooking! So hey, every few weeks, just plant some more cilantro seeds - over time you'll have some leafy and ready to be snipped and torn into your recipes, and you'll also have some that have gone to seed and are ready to dry for later use!