If you plan to start a garden this spring, don’t just plant lettuce for your salads. Why not plant your own mesclun mix? The most amazing salads can come from your own backyard.
My father-in-law grows a wide variety of vegetables at his summer cottage, and his green salads are better than anything I’ve had in a fancy restaurant. He starts with the basics: romaine lettuce, green leaf lettuce, and red leaf lettuce. He also uses oakleaf lettuce, which is just regular lettuce whose leaves are palmate (hand-shaped) and therefore look a bit like oak leaves. These lettuces provide most of the ingredients for the salad. He collects individual leaves from each plant, so that each plant continues to grow through the summer. His lettuce can grow up to two feet tall (on the stem) and he still makes salads with it. Of course, any lettuce plant will reach a point where its leaves will taste very bitter, and by mid-August, much of the lettuce for your salads comes from the local supermarket, but you still get dozens of other ingredients from the garden. .
Here are some of those other ‘vegetables’ in Grandpa Green’s garden that find their way into his delicious salads. Radicchio provides a nice burgundy red color. Be careful to use it sparingly in a salad, as radicchio is naturally bitter, and remove the thick white stem part of each leaf. Arugula is very easy to grow from seed, and you can start by harvesting the extra seedlings for the salad while thinning out the seedlings. Pick individual leaves as the plants grow, and you can get two to three months of arugula flavor from each plant. I find arugula to be one of the most interesting flavors in a salad. It’s a bit bitter but it also has a bite, and it’s important to break it into small pieces.
One of our great pastimes at the cabin dinner table is guessing what’s in the salad. My father-in-law usually puts in twenty or more garden ingredients. These are some of the others that he grows and tossed into salads, usually just a handful of each. First, a couple of perennial herbs grow outside the garden fence (because deer don’t seem to find these herbs all that interesting. One is bee balm or bergamot; they grow leaves that taste like Earl Gray tea and beautiful scarlet-red flowers that they can be broken into their individual florets, the florets tossed into the salad for visual effect Half a dozen bergamot leaves, chopped small, is all you want in a large salad Oregano is another deer-proof perennial favorite but again, use only a few small leaves.Interestingly, oregano tastes much milder fresh than dried, unlike its cousin basil, which has a much more intense flavor fresh.
Anise hyssop is hard to buy in herbal form, but you can usually find seeds at garden centers; it grows beautiful complex purple lance-shaped flowers, and again you can use the florets for visual effect in a green salad. The leaves taste like anise or licorice. Anise hyssop is not strictly a perennial, but it self-sows reliably, so once you plant a few, you’ll have them year after year.
Chives are another perennial favorite. You can snip off just a few leaves and cut them into one-inch pieces for a salad, and don’t forget to use some of the chive flowers as well. Since we’re in the onion family, don’t forget to use some garlic leaves – the green leaves of your garlic plants and the florets, too. But be careful with garlic, as a little goes a long way.
There’s an old half-whiskey barrel on the terrace of the cottage in which pansies grow, and some of the pansy flowers sometimes find their way into a salad (they’re edible, as are the violet flowers, if you don’t mind). get them off your lawn). Lemon balm is another interesting perennial, with a citrus flavor that makes it easy to identify when playing salad guessing games. Tarragon is another anise-flavored herb, but I’m not a big fan; for some reason the tarragon makes my mouth numb. But I’ve been dismissed in that regard and there’s always a bit of tarragon in our homemade salads.
Kale grows well in northern gardens, and we sometimes harvest mature kale in the dead of winter. When the plants are young in August and September, the smaller leaves do well in a salad, but because they are rough, they need to be broken into small pieces. Kale is very good for you, as are most members of the cabbage family.
Borage produces tall plants with hairy leaves and lilac flowers; its leaves have a slight cucumber flavor and are slightly bitter, so don’t add too much to a salad.
There are some herbs that you can plant once, and will self-seed for years afterward (if you let them); these go well in a salad too. Dill and cilantro are two of my father-in-law’s ‘perennial annuals’ that keep turning up in odd places in the garden and can get out of control if you’re not careful. So weeding the seedlings for a salad is a good way to keep them in check and enjoy their flavor.
When my father-in-law comes home from the garden around 5 o’clock, he usually has two large plastic containers filled with a wide variety of vegetables. After washing them, breaking up the biggest pieces, and adding them to a giant salad bowl, he usually adds a couple of store-bought ingredients to round out the textures and flavors of the salad. These include sweet red peppers (cut into small pieces) and fennel bulb (also called Florence fennel or aniseed). Then add a simple olive oil dressing, several wine vinegars, a dash of Dijon mustard, and a teaspoon of sugar.
The salad is served at the end of the main course, so that the vinegar does not spoil the taste of the wine that we are drinking. Sometimes the salad bowl goes three or four turns before it’s gone, and eating a fresh green salad grown right in the home garden is one of the greatest pleasures of summer. You won’t find anything quite as tasty in a fancy restaurant, and most of it, like the best things in life, is free. So if you’re planning your garden this summer, or just want to turn a few square yards of your lawn to productive use, be sure to plant plenty of salad ingredients.