Edible Salad Garden. Rosalind Creasy

      In the space under the bedroom window (foreground) I planted red cabbages, Japanese red mustard, and ornamental cabbages. I then lined the path with chamomile, and created crescent-shaped beds near the patio for succession plantings of salad greens.

      Doug and Mimi brought everything back and washed and spin-dried it. Next they set up five pottery bowls—some as big as two feet across—along a large counter, and then went to it. First Doug lined two of the bowls with baby leaves of ‘Russian Red’ kale, one with baby red lettuces, one with romaine lettuce, and a final one with frilly frisée. Mimi broke up five or six kinds of lettuces, some radicchio, and some endive and started adding their leaves to a few of the bowls. Into one salad went a little fennel, into another a little chervil, and into another went red orach or some slices of baby kohlrabi. The decisions weren’t random; Doug and Mimi had done this many times before and had their favorite combinations. To garnish the salads, Doug julienned some stalks of red chard and sprinkled them over some chartreuse lettuces. Onto one of the simple lettuce salads Mimi scattered miniature roses, pea blossoms, borage flowers, and mustard blossoms. Deep red nasturtiums were artfully placed on one, calendula petals scattered over another. Sunflower seeds went into one, pecans into another, and on and on went the assembly process. Within an hour the buffet table was covered with fabulous salads, and the appreciative diners were feasting.

      Since watching Doug and Mimi, I have turned up many other creative salads made with many unusual garden ingredients and in many styles. Obviously, there is more to making a salad than tossing together a piece of iceberg lettuce and a few slices of tomato. From Andrea Crawford, at the Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, I learned about baby cutting lettuces. From Shep Ogden in Vermont I learned about growing specialty lettuce varieties—he and his wife, Ellen, served me a salad in February made of just-sprouted greens from their greenhouse. From Bruce Naftaly and Robin Sanders, chef-owners at Le Gourmand in Seattle, I learned about wild greens, fancy vinegars, and olive oils. But I gathered the most information over the past decades from the salad garden in my own front and backyard gardens. Here my day-to-day experimentation with a large number of ingredients has added dramatically to my repertoire of salads.

      Before I go much further, it’s important to mention that although just about any vegetable can be made into a salad, in this book I have chosen to concentrate on green, leafy salads in their myriad forms. This means that I set out to examine in detail most of the aromatic herbs and leafy domestic vegetables used worldwide in salads. I have included very few wild greens, however, since that subject could amount to a book in itself.

      In doing my research, I have certainly widened my definition of a salad, and I hope you will too. But in learning a great deal about salad greens, I also came to appreciate an important fact: nowhere else in your from-the-garden cooking does freshness and quality result in such dramatic improvement as with greens and herbs. In this regard, I discovered that most of the chefs in this country long for garden-fresh produce and have no commercial access to it. As Seppi Renggli, onetime chef of the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, told me, “I have a garden at home and get used to all these special fresh vegetables and unusual herbs, but I can’t get many commercially for the restaurant.” To treat yourself, and eat like royalty, put in a small salad garden.

      This is another look at my patio salad garden this time from the other side and in the summertime. In the beds are a small pool of ‘Australian Yellow’ lettuce, two pepper plants, and some basil. Because salad greens generally grow poorly in the heat of midsummer, I’ve planted a number of ornamentals including impatiens and begonias to fill it in.

      The leaf lettuces ‘Black-seeded Simpson,’ ‘Marvel of Four Seasons,’ and a crisp head variety grow in old wooden buckets on my front retaining wall. They are surrounded by California poppies and orange calendulas.

      how to grow a salad garden

      Salad gardening is largely cool-weather gardening. Our ancestors eagerly looked forward to the first greens of spring. After spending a winter eating root vegetables and dense cabbages, they savored those first succulent leaves of lettuce or, more often, wild greens as a precious to the body and soul. In the late 1800s refrigerated railroad cars began transporting California-grown iceberg lettuces to the East Coast, and these out-of-season crunchy greens became the rage among Victorian hostesses. For decades iceberg-type lettuces dominated the American salad, in both the market and the home garden. To our benefit, in the 1970s the concept of a salad began to change dramatically. Travelers and chefs went abroad and brought back a hunger for different greens like arugula, Shanghai baby bok choys, and mesclun baby salad greens. Concerned citizens in the 1980s pushed for better nutrition, and along with organic produce they discovered the power of leafy greens and the extra vitamins in sprouts. Meanwhile, chefs were busy creating a world cuisine that fused the foods not only of other continents but of other times as well. Heirloom salad greens like orach, miner’s lettuce, dandelions, and other wild greens were brought back to the repertoire. Today the concept of a salad is quite grand, and thanks to modern transportation, we enjoy them year-round. Therefore, the cool-weather preference of these leafy vegetables is less obvious. But as you harvest your greens, you will find the majority of your salad-garden production will come in the spring, fall, and, with extra protection, the winter.

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