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?

Baby pak choi, a semi-failure

I have been putting off writing about baby pak choi for a week.  Maybe because they fall in my semi-failure category of greens.  The variety is Shanghai, a green stemmed variety from Kitazawa (High Mowing also supplies it).  I don't totally remember why I picked it except that it is a 'high yielding, cool season annual.'  It forms an hourglass shape and is pretty much grown for its flesh petioles (the bit that connects the leaf to the stem). 

 Growing a sexy, hourglass figure when you're crammed into a tray is kind of hard.  This is why I called it a semi-failure.  I got to eat some hand selected, delicious baby pak choi, but no one else did.  They variety just did not work as a baby green for the growing system we use.  I bet if they were grown in-ground with a bit more space instead of in trays they would be a brilliant (and high grossing?) crop.

*What is the proper way to spell pak choi?  Recently, I've been using a 'K' as Kitazawa does, but High Mowing using a 'C'.

Red violet pak choi

Red violet pak choi is one of my favorite 'greens' this fall.  

I keep trying to take pictures of it, but it just doesn't seem to be very photogenic.

It's a hybrid in the B. rapa narinosa group of the brassica family.  It's cold tolerant and a vigorous producer.  It has spoon shaped leaves that can get pretty big (as big as my hand for example).  Leaves are always mild flavored, and tender, at least when grown in a greenhouse like I am.  

 There is great variety in leaf color from green with reddish viens, to red to deep purple.  I'm not sure if temperature or location has anything to do with this.  The seeds came from Kitazawa and their picture shows very dark purple plants grown outside.

Pak choi - a green for next winter season

I'm getting together a list of greens to try out during the next winter growing season.  Pak choi is definitely on the list.  The greens on the left of the picture above are variety of pak choi called joy choi (tatsoi is on the left).  Pak choi part of the Brassica rapa var. chinensis group.  Originally we didn't think it would be a very good baby green because it forms heavy heads.  It seemed to work out in the tray above and grew faster than the tatsoi!  The stems were thick and crunchy but the taste was mild.  Pretty much exactly what I want to be eating in the middle of winter.