Salad greens in the garden

About a month ago, when salad green production in the greenhouses was starting to slow down I had a bad thought:

"What I am going to eat when the salad runs out?"

I  took some of the flats of greenhouse greens that had been harvested, divided them up and stuck them in our outside garden.  You can see the swiss chard above is still planted very close together - not at all the recommended 4-6 inch spacing between plants.  I wasn't about to untangle all 150+ plants that were in the flat.  Since the plants are so densely packed we harvest leaves are still pretty small - about the size of my hand.     

I also squashed in a flat of red russian kale.  Given more space to grow its leaves are much broader than when grown in the greenhouse.  Hand-sized leaves mean it's still tender enough to eat in salads or on sandwiches.

Lastly, vitmin green.  Like red russian kale, vitamin green really spreads itself out when given more space.  The broad leaves are mild and tender.  Beetles seem to like eating them just as much as we do.  If I had been smart I would have covered the plants right away with some lightweight row cover.  Now it's too late.  Covering the plants would probably trap pests in.  I don't mind the holes since I'm not trying to sell these greens.  Other brassicas that beetles like include arugula, mustards and napa cabbage.  See here for more information on managing flea beetles in brassicas.

Organizing salad greens by yield

When looking at yield data collected this past spring, I found the salad greens I've grown could be roughly categorized into three groups: heavy, mid and light weight.  These distinctions could be useful when building a unique salad mix with some lessor known salad green varieties.

The highest yielding greens were the lettuces and loose headed cabbages.  These make a good basis for a salad mix because they are a) heavy and b) mild tasting.

Medium yield greens contain some of my favorite greens.  Ok, they are all my favorites and when mixed together they make a nice salad.  None of these have any spicy-ness, but they do offer good tastes and nice curvy leaves.  And beets and chard just so pretty.

Spicy mustards, arugula and kale make up the light weight category.  They are 'lofty' and add texture, color and interest to salad mixes.  Often, these are the greens that you don't want too much of in a salad anyway.  I've tried the mainly-mustard-greens salad and it was too much. The keyword there was 'tried.'  Other varieties of kale may produce a heavier yield, but the russian kales have rather spindly leaves when they are young.

What would you choose to put in your salad mix?

More on Vates kale

I wrote about vates kale about a month ago.  Two harvests later it's still going strong.  Whether or not a variety is a good cut-and-come-again green when grown on benches is something I started to assessed this week.  Kale seems to be a good contender.

Vates Kale

I planted this kale a month ago and forgot what it was because I didn't label the tray.  I thought it was broccoli for a few days (even though I don't actually have any broccoli seeds). But it's not - it's Vates kale from High Mowing.  It's delightful and sweet and better than red russian kale.  The hairs on the edges of the leaves are not sharp.  If I didn't have to spray it with aphid killing pesticides I would be eating this weekend.  Oh well, it will be eaten soon.

Salad mix for the end of the semester

I know salad and the end of the semester don't really have anything to do with each other.  It's not as though not having to go to class makes me really, really want kale or something.  The end of this semester is worth celebrating because I am done taking classes - forever!  (Unless I decided to get another degree sometime.)  Of course, the class part is fun, it's the exam part that isn't.

Most of my salads contain something red because it is just so pretty.  Cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and all other summer time vegetables seem a memory in the distant past.  Right now red greens (ha!) are what make salad more interesting.  And feta cheese, which has renewed my salad consuming capabilities to an all time high.  

Salad mix of the week

The hurricane blew away all the remaining fall leaves, and now it looks like winter in New England.  Namely, there are bare, brown trees, empty fields and bleak skies, which, secretly I like as long as I can spend lots of time reading books.  

This salad mix isn't really that summery since it has kale and spinach in it, but the muted colors made me think of late August.  I don't really think of lettuce as very hardy winter green either, more of a fair-weather-only kind of green.

Help needed!

In the coming fall and spring I'll be looking in depth at the growth rate of six greens throughout the season.  The list includes: mizuna, tokyo bekana, tatsoi, spinach, and green romaine lettuce.  I need help picking the sixth variety. Here are the options: 

Scarlet frills: red, curly leaves, from the brassica family,
has a mustard-y flavor that can be a bit spicy when weather is warm.

Red russian kale: Also a brassica, known for being cold weather hardy, 

usually grown for mature leaves (not baby size for salads).

What do you think?  Are there other varieties you think should be on the list?  Leave me a comment (via facebook or the little pencil on the actual post) or send an email.  I can see how many people view the post so I know when you're not replying!  It's for science!

(I will be doing a variety trial of 20 greens once in the fall and once in the spring to look at lesser known varieties like vitamin green and tatsai.)

Dinner on a muggy night

If you are anywhere in the New England area this week, or just in the United States at all this summer, chances are you don't want to do much cooking.  After traveling for a week, and breaking out in a sweat just standing up I was not about to actually cook anything for dinner tonight.  Since I just got back last night from the OFA short course (more on that in the future once I've had a bit more sleep) the vegetable part of my diet has been lacking.

I have not been eating many of these.  Although I dissected a restaurant salad
and found both mizuna and tatsoi in it!

Not to worry!  Remember the class I went to on super nourishing greens back in the spring?  When everyone else said their favorite dish was the arugula pesto, my favorite was the greens soup.  The pesto was great, but it involved pasta, cheese and basil, which happen to be three of my Favorite Foods of All Time.  Not like this soup, which has not one, but three amazing things about it:

1. There is no cooking involved.
2. You get tricked into slurping up four vegetables without realizing it.  Five if you count avocado as a vegetable.
3. Zucchini is one of those vegetables.  We are just beginning zucchini season here, which means it is a treat and not something you feed to the dog because you have more summer squash than you know what to do with.

If you are my mom you might be thinking "what! avocado?!"  Yes, today I bought my first two avocados ever.  Perhaps this will be the year I discover how wonderful guacamole is because I have an extra one sitting in the fridge now.

Recipe 

(adapted from the Food and Health Forum- 

if you join their mailing list you get a whole digital cookbook!)

Blend together a cucumber, a whole bunch of kale and a cup of water.  Spinach would be fine too.  I did this with my immersion blender.  Dump in an avocado, juice from a lemon, a capful of soy sauce, a teaspoon of ginger and a pinch of cayenne.  Blend it some more. Then taste it.  Grate in one moderate sized (8 inch) zucchini and fold in a cup of corn.  Chill until served.  People may be put off by how it looks.  They are fools.

* Edit 7/19:  For dinner we had chips and cheese dip which balanced out the cool vegetable-ness.  Bruschetta would also be good on a not-so-muggy day.

The brassica family

Many of the greens I grow come from the huge brassica family.  By no means is this 'family tree' of brassica's complete.  It's mainly the greens I have grown, the greens I'd like to grow, and some other branches that are substantial/important.  Have I gotten anything wrong?  Anything you would like to see added? 

tree picture

Graphing the growth rate of greens

I have now measured 14,400 leaves and weighed 8,505 grams of harvested greens, so it's about time to make some graphs out of all that data. (8.5 kg is almost 20 pounds, which is ALOT of greens.  You could make many, many salads.)

I love making graphs.  Partly because they get to be colorful, but mostly because they take a whole bunch of numbers and organize them.  The graphs below took 12,200 numbers to make. Think about that for a while.

(The y-axis is leaf length in cm.  I forgot to label it.)

This graph shows the growth rate of each variety of green that I planted on 3/20.  I didn't start measuring until the plants had harvestable leaves, which was around the 12th/13th of April.  If you remember my overview of this experiment post at the beginning of April I was hoping to see the growth rate level off.  From this graph you can see that did not happen.  The greens just kept growing and growing.  I had to stop measuring leaf length, not because I ran out of greens, but because the greens ran out of nutrients and looked ugly.  (As shown in the stressed out greens post.)  The little black x's mark the best harvests. 

(The y-axis is harvest weight in grams.  I forgot to label it.)

The graph of harvest weights shows a general trend of continued growth for most varieties.  Toyko benkana and Outrageous lettuce have weird, unexplainable dips in harvest weight near the end.  I don't know what happened to cause that, but it does show why I have to do experiments a few times.

These two graphs aren't everything.  Now that I'm done measuring and harvesting four times a week I'll be using this data (all 14,400 numbers) to extrapolate things like: potential harvest weight, optimal harvesting time and how much money it cost to do all this.  Pretty cool stuff eh?

See us grow!

Five varieties, three weeks.

Stuffing myself full of greens

If you remember, a few weeks ago I was lamenting that I have too many greens and was searching for new ways to eat them.  Coincidentally, a few nights ago there was a "Super nourishing greens cooking and wellness" class a few towns over.  (It was held at the Blue Moon Cafe.  I've never eaten there before, but the menu sounded amazing.)  Now I'm full of ideas how to use up all our greens.

Last night we had mustard green pesto for dinner.  I guess pesto isn't really that original.  For whatever reason I didn't think that I could use mustard greens to make it.  Maybe because no one else does?  Mustard greens (all five varieties!) have been the hardest to get rid of because they can't be put into a smoothie.  We tried, but it just didn't taste very good.

My mustard green pesto with sunflower seeds and LOTS of garlic tasted pretty good.  It didn't photograph so well, and just looked like green goop.  You'll just have to believe me when I say it tasted good.

Stressed out greens

I came into the greenhouse on Monday to find I wasn't the only one stressed out this week.  I'm working on finishing lengthy term papers for the end of the semester.  The greens are stressed out because they are running out of nutrients.  In some varieties stress is shown by leaves turning purplish, in others the leaves bleach to bright yellow.  The tokyo bekana, kale, arugula and tat soi above are all brassicas that were first to reach harvestable size (Mizuna was as well, but I didn't take a picture of it looking stressed out).  So, it makes sense that they would use up all their nutrients first.  I am growing the greens in compost, which should provide all the nutrients needed.  If I were growing these to eat, or for sale I would have harvested them last week before they got stressed out.  

Happily, the lettuces still look good.  Most of the year I am not a supporter of lettuce - it is bland, or bitter and doesn't have as many nutrients as other greens.  At this time of year though, it is perfect!  All green and leafy tasting.  Lettuce is in the Aster family, along with dandelions.  I don't think they are close taxonomic relatives, but I do think that lettuce smells a bit like dandelions.

plant profile: kale

Without meaning to I've neglected to say anything about kale.  I am not not quite sure if I like eating kale as a salad green, which may be why I haven't written anything about it.

Don't get me wrong, I love kale, but I prefer it cooked.  As a baby green it seems rather frilly and tasteless compared to the other mustard greens I'm growing right now.  Since I've been collecting growth data for two weeks now I can say that kale has been steadily growing, so maybe I'll change my mind by next week. 

 After every harvest I photograph a few representative leaves of each species.  When I'm done with the study I'm going to put the pictures together along with graphs to really show the growth rate of each salad green.  Right now I don't have enough data points to make a worthwhile graph, but I think the photos of kale growth look pretty nice.

 I'm growing red russian kale, which is a pretty typical variety.  Maybe a different variety would be a better salad green?  My favorite is white russian because it is sweet and tender in comparison to red russian.  Siberian kale is advertised as being good raw, so I better try it next fall.

four weeks of growth - it's time to eat!

All the greens are not 'full size' yet, but the kale, mizuna, tokyo bekana, tatsoi and scarlett frills are!

two weeks of growth!

What a difference just one week can make!

Growth rate of greens (or experiment number two!)

Even though the weather right now is not very winter-like I've started a second experiment.  Describing this one is much simpler:  I am going to see how different varieties of greens grow in the 'cold.'  The same kind of work was done last spring and fall and I'll be doing a lot more of it next winter.  

A few of the greens I'm growing are in this mixed flat.

The goal is to be able to estimate how long it will take green to reach a harvestable size as light and temperature levels change drastically in the fall and spring.  By the end I'd like the be able to say "if you plant lettuce in September you'll be harvesting in late october, but if you plant in october you won't be harvesting until december."

Arugula grown spring 2011

The chart above is a snippet of the data collected last year.  The temperatures are when the greenhouse heaters turn on.  You can see that keeping the greenhouse ten degrees warmer makes a big difference in growth (leaf length).  The length of the arugula grown at 40 degrees seems to be leveling off at around 40 days of growth.  If you knew it was not going to grow anymore you would harvest it at forty days.  Leaving it in the ground won't mean it was going to grow anymore.  The same observation can't be made for the arugula grown at fifty degrees - which is why we need more data!

What's going to happen:

I am growing ten varieties of greens:

1. spinach
2. kale
3. green romaine lettuce
4. red romaine lettuce
5. arugula
6. mizuna
7. tokyo bekana
8. tat soi
9. ruby streaks
10. scarlet frills

I'll make eight harvests at 3 - 10 weeks after planting.

At each harvest I will measure:

• The length of 10 leaves of each species 
• The weight of each species harvested

Pretty simple!  Are there any greens you would like to see on the list?  Leave a comment below and I'll take it into consideration for the next round.

one week of growth

These little guys are only one week old!  They are part of  the new experiment I am working on.  I'll start posting about it in the very near future.

The Obama State Dinner in honor of Prime Minister David Cameron

picture from obamafoodorama.blogspot.com

This week the English prime minister came to visit.  Above is a picture of White House chef's collecting greens from the garden for the dinner.  The climate in Washington DC is much warmer than here in New Hampshire- you can tell because they have greens growing outside already! (Also you can see cherry blossoms blooming in the background.)  Nonetheless, the White House vegetable garden still has low tunnels - maybe to keep bugs off the brassicas?


Everything on the menu from the event sounds delicious.

State Dinner Menu in Honor of 
Prime Minister David Cameron
and Mrs. Samantha Cameron

First Course

Crisped Halibut with Potato Crust
Shaved Brussels Sprouts
Applewood Smoked Bacon

Second Course
Spring Garden Lettuces
Shallot Dressing, Shaved Breakfast Radish
Cucumbers and Avocados

Main Course
Bison Wellington
Red Wine Reduction
French Beans, Cipollini Onion

Dessert
Warm Meyer Lemon Steamed Pudding
with Idaho Huckleberry Sauce and Newtown Pippin Apples

Why your mom told you to eat your greens

I believe a good diet is balanced.  That being said, the heap of fried seafood I helped consume yesterday totally upset that balance.   It was delicious but, for the next week or so I feel like I should only eat leafy green vegetables.  The kind I ate in giant bites as a kid in order to get them over with as fast as possible.

The kale I planted a month ago is now at the super cute puppy stage.

What makes greens so good for you?  Keeping me from being anemic and getting scurvy where the vague reasons in my head.  Once again I turned to myplate.gov and their "food-a-pedia." This gave me so much information that I have to think about it in small bits.  I chose to compare the greens I am using in the germination trials, as well as my two favorite cooking greens.  (Arugula is a substitute for mizuna because myplate didn't have any information about mizuna.)

data for this graph came from myplate.gov

First nutrient up is folate.  I didn't know what this was, possibly because it isn't on most nutrion labels.  It is one of the B vitamins and awfully important because it helps make and repair your DNA!  In my greens comparison collards were the clear winner for amount of folate per serving.  Interestingly, kale contains the lowest amount.

Of course, folate isn't the only reason greens are good for you.  In the future I'll look at calcium, vitamin C & A, and potassium.