Jan–MarApr–JunJul–SepOct–Dec
Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-289
Miners Lettuce
Claytonia perfoliata
Miner's lettuce is a small, mild-flavoured salad green with a slightly mucilaginous texture that also works as a living winter ground cover, carpeting bare soil with rosettes that would otherwise crust and bake. It germinates in autumn, crops through winter and early spring, and dies back before summer heat arrives, so it is grown on exactly that calendar rather than fought into a hot season. Every part above ground is edible - leaves, stalks and flowers - and it is exceptionally high in vitamin C, the trait behind its name: it fed California gold miners a scurvy-preventing green. Left to seed once, it returns unaided every autumn on its own, and disappears completely by early summer with no risk of persisting into a colony.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Partial Sun · Shade
- USDA zone
- USDA 6–9
- Soil
- Sand · Loam · Clay
- Moisture
- Moderate · Wet
Vertical layer
Groundcover- Soil pH
- 6–7
- Plant type
- Annual
- Mature height
- 2–8 in
- Mature spread
- 8–12 in
- Plant spacing
- 4–6 in
- Root type
- Fibrous-shallow
- Spread pattern
- Seed
Keep exploring
Similar plants
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Waldsteinia fragarioides
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Beach Strawberry
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Black Medick
Medicago lupulina
Black Medick is a low, sprawling nitrogen-fixing clover relative that forms a mowable mat through fall, winter and spring before dying back…
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Brahmi
Bacopa monnieri
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Carpet Bugle
Ajuga reptans
Carpet Bugle forms a fast, dense, rooting mat that thrives in dry shade - the hardest niche on most properties to fill, since dry ground…
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Common Chickweed
Stellaria media
Common chickweed is a cool-season annual that carpets bare ground through the winter months, exactly when pasture and garden beds otherwise…
Groundcover · USDA 4–11
The deeper layer
Plan what comes next.
- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
- Locked ecological function
- Byproduct
- Locked ecological function
Behind the record
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