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?

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.

Beauty shots

All those cloudy days last week were good for taking pictures.  I took lots.  Not the kind of pictures that will someday be useful for presentations or paper writing, but the super-close-up kind. (Actually, I did take lots of 'useful' pictures too, someday maybe you'll see them.)  

Ruby streaks are my favorite green to photograph right now.  I love their bright green stems.

I have lots of data right now, but haven't done anything with it beside enter it into excel.  Once the semester is really over I'll have time to do something with it.

Everything that's growing (except arugula)

Scarlett frills, tokyo bekana, mizuna, red romaine, red russian kale, 

green romaine, tatsoi, spinach, ruby streaks

Scarlett and Ruby

Meet Scarlett and Ruby, two of the mustard greens that are being measured and weighed during the next few weeks.  During the summer I hated harvesting this kind of green because they were always frilly, bolting and never amounted to very much.  

I thought these two greens would be pretty much the same thing: dark red frilly mustard greens.  But they are definitely not!  Scarlett Frills is darker with skinny leaves.  Ruby Streaks is reddish and bright green.  It's far 'frilly-er' (and I think prettier).