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

Planting the Keyhole Salad Garden

Several years ago we arranged dirt into a “U” shaped formation called a keyhole. See the post here. This garden has functioned beautifully in that the ingredients for a salad can all be picked from one area. Before the keyhole it took a lot of walking to gather everything. Now we can pick along one side of the pathway, turn at the end, and then pick along the other side.

Almost as soon as the snow melted this spring, we’ve been using perennial onions, chives, sorrel, upland cress, lovage and garlic chives. These are perennials that appear every year. This year some mache showed up. It was not planted, but somehow seeds must have drifted over from a nearby cold frame.

The keyhole garden has perennial onions, lovage, many clumps of chives, other perennials, and now rows of seeds.

Even with all of the perennials, there is still plenty of room for some annuals. This past weekend I seeded rows of greens. Two of the rows will have red and green varieties of butterhead, romaine and leaf lettuces. Another row will consist of three types of arugula. The Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalog is offering wasabi arugula which we considered a must-try for something new this year. Can’t wait to taste it. A row of mixed greens will include mizuna, escarole, minutina and tatsoi.

I added some cilantro and radish seeds between the chives, and seeded more garlic chives at the end of the row. Nasturtium seeds will be stuck in along the edges when the weather gets a bit warmer.

We are looking forward to many eclectic salads! -G.H.

It’s so... well, convenient! An Update on the Salad Garden

In fall of 2011, I posted about starting up a new salad garden. Click here for the post, and here for a 2012 update. Our salad greens were being picked from different garden areas and you had to wander around a lot to get from one to another. My thinking for the new garden was to get all or most of the salad veggies into one place to make it more convenient to go out and pick a salad. Kind of like a supermarket aisle entirely devoted to salad, except ours would have lots more variety and cost a lot less.  

I made the salad garden in the shape of a keyhole; that is, a three sided garden bed with a central pathway. It could be called a horseshoe garden if the pathway were a more rounded shape. The idea of a keyhole garden derives from permaculture. It makes better use of a garden-able area than rows; maximizing plant-growing space while minimizing pathways.

For a salad garden a keyhole seemed like a perfect shape. You can walk into it with your picking basket and pick your salad greens along one side of the path, and wander out while doing the same along the other side. This little trip should theoretically fill your basket with lettuces, greens, green onions and whatever else is growing at the time for your daily salad.   

Before making the garden, I had visualized it, mentally walking in and picking. I do this with all of my new garden areas. Visualizing, for me is a lot easier than drawing a plan on paper; a little map showing the shape of the garden bed and where to put each of the plants. A paper plan almost never pans out in reality. There are always changes. Visualizing lets me rethink things on the fly, and is a system that works. It’s only afterwards that I draw a diagram of what I did. See our earlier post on keeping a notebook. The notebook helps to keep track of what was planted and where.

The Salad Garden as viewed from the back

The salad garden that I visualized, and then shoveled and raked into existence is working very well. It’s pretty much like I had imagined it. You can walk in and pick chives, lettuce, and arugula along one side. At the far end, yank out a perennial onion and snatch some lovage leaves. On your way out, snip some pieces of upland cress, nab some nasturtium leaves and, if you like, pull up a singular clove of wild garlic. There’s also Giant Red Mustard (great stuff!), and some self-seeded cilantro is starting up. 

So many flavors all in one place!. We gather a salad every day, and this garden makes it easy and a real pleasure. It is functional, handy, and convenient. We do love a good salad, and now it’s so easy to pick! -jmm

Salad Art

This time of year is good for salad making. Our salad plants are year -round with the use of  cold frames, but right now our salads are especially full of flavors and colors. The multi-hued greens of freshly picked leafy plants beautifully set off the colors of the many other things we add.

The brilliant colors of summer salad

The leafy greens include three kinds of lettuce, and arugula, upland cress, and lovage. To this we add perennial onion, chives, cucumber, tomato, carrot, red and yellow peppers. Colorful additions to this are raddichio, purple cabbage, and chive blossoms (all purple); blueberries or raspberries; and brilliant orange and yellow nasturtium flowers.

This makes a full bodied salad that is a seasonal luxury. It seems to call for the uncorking of a bottle of rich, red bordeaux wine, and a wood-fire grilled t-bone steak as a side dish. It is edible art. G.H. and jmm

The Salad Garden is Coming up Chives

Last fall I wrote about starting a new garden. This is a permaculture-inspired keyhole garden designed for picking ingredients for salads.

Chives and Upland Cress

It’s coming up chives. And perennial onions, lovage, and upland cress. And some cilantro. Around the edges some giant red mustard are starting up. Perennials and reseeding annuals will anchor this garden. Things we won’t have to plant every year.

Gil has put in seeds for lettuces, arugula, epazote, cilantro, and root parsley, increasing the diversity.

Cilantro and Chives

I'm thinking of moving some ramps in too. Ramps are wild garlic. Years ago I planted a garlic clove from the supermarket. It grew, but as a spindly, single tiny bulb, not cloves. The plant went to seed and more bulbs grew, and the clump spread a little more every year. I was told it was no good as garlic. I ignored both the advice and the clump. Now, I find in places like Bon Appetite magazine recipes calling for ramps. Isn’t that funny. So I think I will move some into the salad garden.

The little keyhole garden makes me happy. Not just that it is bordered on two sides by roses and peonies, but also that I like to walk into it. And then out of it on the same pathway. It will be fun to pick salads here this summer. What a clever idea it is. Really quite the place already. It’s growing on me. -jmm

What's Happening Now

The closet is so full of squash we’ve had to move our shoes out of there. Potatoes and newspapers are layered in brown paper bags on the floor of the root cellar. The freezer is filled to capacity with green beans, beef, cranberries, beets, beef, peas, greens, more beef, tomato sauce, strawberries and rhubarb. And beef.

So, you might think the gardening is over, right? Au contraire! The gardening is still a plethora in the happening (editors note- please accept that sentence as some kind of plethoretic poetry. If you happen to know my husband, feel free to ask. -jmm)

It's fall planting time. Yes, it's fall, and yes, I said planting. This is the time to plant garlic and to spread seeds into the cold frames. Eating from the garden year round means fall is both harvest and planting time.

Two kinds of kale

Garlic is essential to our cooking; we use it in almost everything. It needs at least a two-month cold spell for the individual cloves to grow and multiply, and here in Maine we can pretty much count on at least a few chilly months. Last weekend we planted 50 cloves that will be ready to harvest next July. After the ground freezes we'll cover the garlic row with straw. 

Our kale row is looking terrific. Kale is a very hardy green that is perfectly fine left in the garden all winter.  After a frost it develops a wonderfully sweet flavor. We brush off the winter snow and pick it to use in stir fries or soups, or steam it as a side dish. Its a favorite winter veggie for us.

Theres a whole lot going on with the cold frames right now. They've been set up for our winter veggies. We've blogged about our cold frames before; they're an integral part of our gardening experience. Click on "Cold Frame" in the side column to read those posts.

Lettuce planted in August has been used up. More lettuce was planted in September and it should be ready in December. Claytonia is now tender sprouts and will be ready to eat in December. Mache was planted in August and will be ready to eat in a couple of weeks. Beet greens and spinach are growing and will be used in salads and as cooked greens through winter. And spinach planted this month will over-winter and be ready to eat in spring.

As we pick these veggies spaces in the cold frames open up. We'll fill them in with more mache, spinach and arugula. These will be ready in early spring when seeds for the summer garden are being put into peat pots. Fall is a great time to be outdoors. Tending the cold frames is no chore at all considering the joys of being able to eat fresh-picked greens all winter long. -G.H.

A Keyhole Salad Garden

Why did we not think of it earlier? Salad! How many places in the yard do we go to in order to gather one? To the garden over to the west of house, then way over to the garden to the east of the house, and a cold frame or two or three in between!

Have you ever mentally kicked yourself for not thinking of something sooner? Kinda what I did when I thought, “ok, theres all these garden spaces but no coherent spot for gathering the one food group we eat every day.”

First of all, theres nothing ordinary about any of our salads. Each one starts with a mix of greens and some onion, and then it’s whatever else is available. Right now nasturtiums are looking beautiful- they’ve vined themselves all over some heather and some lavender plants and it’s all really pretty. And we think the leaves and flowers are pretty in salads too. They add such nice peppery zip.

Making a garden just for salad was a sudden brainstorm. If only there was a handy spot near to the house! And there was! If only a few flowers were moved out first. Very do-able!

The new salad keyhole garden

A close-following brainstorm turned the design into a keyhole. I wrote about the keyhole earlier, here and here. The shape is ideal for a salad garden. You can walk down a center path and pick stuff along three sides of it. Fill up the salad basket and, voila, you’re done!

A great idea being too good to waste, I got busy last weekend and repurposed rows of flowers into a single-path horseshoe shape. The area is about 20 feet long x 15 feet wide and is nestled in between roses and a stone wall. After some very sweaty raking and shoveling- the weather being oddly warm for this time of year- I worked in some manure to get things off to a good start, and then started moving plants.

The chive hedge now lines the new central pathway. Lovage is transplanted to one back corner, and perennial onions to the other. These should colonize and form thick patches.

Reseeding annuals populate one side of the horseshoe. Most of them were stuck in the ground casually, because it is their seeds that will make new plants next year. They are upland cress, cilantro, and giant red mustard. Love those reseeders!

The other side of the horseshoe is left unplanted. This is for non-hardy annuals. In spring we will seed lettuces, arugula, several types of basil, and nasturtium. What's a late-summer salad without nasturtium! Wow, I feel good about this garden! -jmm