The Salad Saga, Part 1

I’ve got salad on my mind.

Is there a food that you can can eat every day and never get tired of it? For me, the answer is yes, and the food is salad. There’s lots of foods I like, but every day would be too much. Chicken, for one thing, is high on my list. But every day? It’d get old fast. I’d soon be craving beef, or fish, or lobster.

I’ve been eating a salad a day for many years. That’s three hundred sixty five salads a year; a lot of salad. It would fill a really big bowl. Imagine the size of this theoretical bowl and then go ahead and visualize it twice as big. This is because there are two us eating a salad a day. Would this much salad fill the living room from floor to ceiling? Would it fill the whole house?

So how does the garden make all of this stuff? Our own garden is where most of our salad ingredients come from. It’s not all lettuce; we harvest a variety of things for eating raw from early in spring until the last killing frost late in fall. And after that we munch on what’s in the cold frames. 

Today's salad is two kinds of lettuce, baby kale, giant red mustard, perennial onion, chives and chive blossoms.

The garden grows more salad stuff than we eat. Sometimes there is too much lettuce, for instance. If there’s too much at once and we can’t eat it all, some ends up as compost. Perennials that we use for salads are never fully harvested because plants need to keep growing so we can keep harvesting from them. Maybe the garden is growing two housefuls of stuff and we don’t even know it.  

The quantity that we need in order to have a salad every day is never apparent by simply looking at the garden. All of it is never there all at one time, and what is there never really looks like all that much. Maybe we’ve developed a knack, and arrange for it naturally. Like something that happens after sticking seeds in the ground, transplanting, trying different plants, working to make good soil, and doing this from year to year. We’re in salad nirvana. And I’m baffled. -jmm