Fast Growing Greens

Week #11. Maybe it’s time to give up the hard stuff and grow something easy.

Fast food is considered unhealthy unless you are talking about salad greens.

Hello Everyone.

My journey to becoming a gardener started with a single packet of Arugula. It was easy to rip open the paper packet, press seeds into the soil and walk away. In less than a week, tiny green sprouts appeared and in two weeks, I had my first homegrown salad. A little bit of success goes a long way. I was smitten with the notion of growing food - especially fast food.

I’ve looked back on this moment and realized that perhaps it was not the spicy-tasting arugula, as the speed with which those tiny seeds grew into something substantial. It was validation that my actions were met with immediate rewards

A month or two later, the rest of the garden caught up. Meanwhile, I was planting and harvesting a continuous succession of arugula, along with other salad greens: Lettuce, spinach, and mustard and all proved to be fast growers. A giant leap forward as a new gardener, growing greens seemed effortless.

This was back in the early 1980s when a relatively unknown mixture of greens called Mesclun was on the verge of becoming popularized by chefs. It took another decade before it became the ubiquitous salad green sold in a plastic clamshell container in every grocery store. Aurugla was one of about twelve different types of greens, all thrown together as a delicious and delicate mix.

Mesclun loosely translated in French means miscellaneous greens because its humble origins were comprised of wild arugula and chicories foraged throughout Europe by peasants to supplement their diet.

The first commercially mixed packets of Mesclun go back to the 1700s with a French seed company called Vilmorin, with the development of ‘ recipes’ based on regional cuisines in France: Nicoise, Provencal, and Miscanza. Each collection comprised carefully cultivated blends of lettuce, herbs, and wild chicories in perfect proportion. With a little research, I found these old recipes and made up my own Mesclun mixes for the garden. Perhaps the thinking went that anything that grows in the wild as a weed would surely be right at home in a garden.

When I told my friends I was growing Mesclun in my kitchen garden, a few looked at me askance as if I was cultivating an illegal drug from the 60s. It was, in a way, a state of mind that led to a new awakening.

This was the beginning of my thinking about the vegetable garden as a work of art, rather than simply a place to grow food. I began to build a collage of lettuces splashed with dabs of red orach, fronds of chervil, and rosettes of claytonia. Seeds and plants became my paintbrush, with swirls of magenta radicchio and spikes of blue-green kale as focal points. Before long, I was growing close to 150 different types of greens, my experiment had gone well beyond arugula and was verging on obsession.

As the world of salad greens opened up, it took me beyond iceberg lettuce to tasting greens in the garden and writing about each in a little notebook.

I wish I still had my tasting notes, but when I close my eyes I can picture the tapestry of greens in my mind’s eye. It was almost too much of a good thing, because here’s the downside of a salad lover’s garden: greens grow fast, and are often ready all at the same time. And not all the greens were delicious, especially on their own. The bitter balanced the sweet, while the bland countered the assertive.

Aurugla can become bitter in the summer heat, radicchio chicories are a bit tricky to grow, and mache is impossible to germinate unless the conditions are right. Bloomsdale spinach is best in spring and fall because it does not bolt and cut-and-come-again lettuces are sublime in the first cutting. Young aromatic herbs such as chervil, dill, and lemon basil are sublime in a mixed salad.

As a kitchen gardener, I still opt for fast-growing greens, because my garden is smaller than a typical vegetable garden. This way, I can change the overall design every few weeks starting in early spring when it is mostly green: by mid-summer, edible flowers punctuate the edges with a pop of color: the fall garden is an excuse to let everything go a little wild. Each week it becomes more visually exciting.

But the real reason to grow salad greens is that anyone can grow arugula: in a pot next to the garage, in a window box on a south-facing window of an apartment, or in a pocket garden next to the kitchen. I do my best to follow a routine set down by Thomas Jefferson, who planted a thimbleful of greens every Monday morning. Start early, and then keep sowing a row or two every week, from early spring to late fall.

Arugula will always be my first love, and with any surplus, most of my neighbors would be thrilled to find a basket of greens on their front porch.

From my Vermont garden to yours,

Ellen O.

Ellen Ecker Ogden

Author of The New Heirloom Garden and The Complete Kitchen Garden, I’m currently working on a new book about fast-growing greens for cooks who love to garden. Inquiries welcome.

The Art of Growing Food newsletter is published weekly. I share recipes and design ideas from my Vermont kitchen garden. If you’d like to know more about my books and lectures, visit: www.ellenogden.com or follow me on Instagram.

Recipe for Zesty Green Sauce

This is a favorite winter green sauce I make with fresh herbs, similar to Chimicurrhi or pesto. In a food processor whir together 1+ cup loosely packed Italian parsley and 1+ cup cilantro — stems and all. Add 2 cloves garlic, the juice of a lemon, a small hot pepper, or a pinch of pepper flakes, salt, and pepper to taste. Then just enough olive oil to become liquid. Spoon over a baked potato, a bowl of cooked Farro, or a wedge of grilled salmon. Store in the refrigerator for at least a week.

Coming Next Week: All about basil.