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?

Salad mix of the week

 I wanted to focus on spinach this week due to the evil spores that are slowly killing all of the spinach I have growing.  This weeks salad mix features spinach with two other dark green leaves: komatsuna and vitamin green.  I've already written about both of these greens, so they should sound familier.

I used baby sized vitamin green in these pictures.  Since taking them I've found 'grown up' sized leaves are better because of the stems.  This salad mix has no spice and would really benefit from exciting, colorful toppings like feta cheese, radishes, pomegranate seeds or all three.  (Last week I bought some feta and my salad eating life has changed!  Also, calling it a 'topping' sounds like I'm making an ice cream sundae.  Dried cherries in salad wouldn't be such a bad idea. . . )

Right now there are spinach seedlings that are not yet showing signs of downy mildew.  I know it is only a matter of time before they will, but until then I'm holding on to them.

komastuna

I thought vitamin green would be the favorite green this fall since everyone in the internet world is so enthusiastic about it.  But then I tried komatsuna.  How can there be a difference between one dark green brassica with oblong leaves and another you ask?  Probably not much. But komatsuna doesn't have much mustard-y taste the way vitamin green does.  In fact, it's almost sweet!