Claytonia, also known as, Winter Miner’s lettuce or Winter Purslane is a great favourite of ours. Many leafy greens survive in winter, but claytonia is almost unique in that it thrives outside in winter and so that’s when you will find it in our salad mixes.
I use a rating system to help me decide what to grow and it considers lots of factors, but the main ones are how tasty it is, healthy it is to eat, how expensive it is to buy, how big it's harvest is, when it's harvest period is and whether I can buy it organically and if not how much it's sprayed.
Claytonia scores moderately well in this system. It’s main benefit is that it’s almost unique in it’s ability to thrive over winter and still give a good, albeit modest harvest. Unlike true lettuce it’s leaves are not thin and tough in winter, they are crisp and succulent, it really is a marvel and healthy too, more nutritious that lettuce. However unlike lettuce it’s also tricky to harvest in quantity and requires some clean-up to remove the odd damaged leaf. It also drops a lot of seed from it’s tiny white - edible - flowers.
<aside> 💡 As a side note claytonia is almost the only leafy greens that I’ve found growing wild in my home town of Lytham St Annes, it grows in the sand dunes
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We love to grow it though, for an unusual supplement to our mid winter salads, where it’s much more welcome than the bitter mustards and other Asian greens, because it has a lovey mild, sweet flavour.
Be sure to also try growing Lambs Lettuce and Salad Rocket too though, both also grow well outside.
<aside> 💡 Despite being known as purslane, it’s nothing like the wonderful golden purslane that I love to grow in summer, so I prefer Miner’s Lettuce or Claytonia, to avoid confusion.
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Claytonia is a great crop and as usual how much you need depends on how much you eat. I work on 0.25m2/person grown under cover and 0.5m2/person outside.
I’m consistently surprised that Claytonia manages to grow in light shade even in winter, although it’s much better in full sun. We grow it in the ground, but it would look lovely in containers too.
In 2022 I’m also going to try growing it in the polytunnel, because I expect that it will be more prolific and there will be less clean-up required.
Sown in late summer it flowers in winter, but it’s flowers are small and edible and flowering doesn’t affect the leaf harvest, which continues unabated.
If you allow seeds to drop they will germinate in late spring/summer, so be prepared to do some weeding if you have other plants in the same bed.
https://airtable.com/shrNAPvMU49e0Ksdv
<aside> 💡 For more details on the model that I use for describing harvest periods (first earlies, second earlies etc) please see the chapter on my growing framework
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Germinate somewhere cool, i.e. a shady spot outside, or a north facing room inside. This early sowing will give a harvest in November. This may not be worthwhile as you will probably have plenty of true lettuce in November. However Miner’s lettuce does make a decorative, interesting addition to salads, so it might be worthwhile this early