Читать книгу Edible Salad Garden - Rosalind Creasy - Страница 6
Оглавлениеthe edible art of salad gardens
How limited my salads have been throughout the years! Seeing a salad in the hands of someone with a completely different vision amazed me. It was sometime in the early 1980s, and I had just entered the kitchen at the Farallones Institute in California in time to see artistic salads being put together for an evening meal. First Doug Gosling and Mimi Fry went out to the garden carrying big baskets to choose a little of this and a little of that. It was late spring, and what a selection! This garden contained every herb, edible flower, baby vegetable, and salad green you could imagine. I think deciding what to include each night must have been the hardest part.
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.
Most gardeners start salad greens early in the spring, though some species and varieties are better started in the summer or fall since their flavor is richer and sweeter when they mature in cool weather. All salad greens need rich, moist, well-drained soil, and the majority benefit from regular applications of compost, small amounts of nitrogen, and supplemental watering. The secret to growing succulent greens is keeping them growing vigorously; otherwise, most get bitter or tough or go to seed prematurely. You can plant salad greens in rows or cast the seeds over a well-prepared bed no more than four feet across. A wider bed is too hard for most people to reach across comfortably and too difficult to weed and harvest.
Most greens are rarely bothered by pests and diseases. The major exceptions would be slugs on ground-hugging greens like lettuces and sorrel, caterpillars on cabbages and bok choys, and leaf miners on spinach and chard.
It is possible to have a wide selection of salad greens growing throughout most of the year through sucession planting. This is a technique for keeping a constant supply of young plants coming along by continually seeding in flats or containers and then using transplants to fill in the holes left by harvested plants. Most of the major seed companies in this country carry a nice selection of lettuces and greens, but for the more unusual species and varieties you will probably want to obtain seeds from the companies listed in the “Resources” section on page 104.
My front yard vegetable garden is filled with salad ingredients. In the middle bed, from left to right, are beets, crisp head lettuces, a small bed of mesclun seedlings, curly endive, and onions.
In the back bed are sprouting broccolis and ‘Ruby’ chard. My assistant, Wendy Krupnick, harvests romaine, leaf, and butter lettuces, parsley, and chervil from my back patio salad garden.
Baby Greens and Salad Mixes
No discussion of salad gardening would be complete without an indepth look at baby greens and salad mixes. The only salad greens that don’t make sense to me to harvest as babies are Belgian endive and some radicchios (they’d be too bitter) and most cabbages (they’d be tough and a waste of expensive seed). That leaves hundreds of different varieties of greens. When reading about growing baby salad greens, you’ll come across a number of terms, which I will run through here to clear up a few misconceptions. As the name implies, baby salad greens are immature plants less than four inches long and usually less than six weeks old. Sometimes they are but the thinnings of greens being salvaged from the seedling row, but more often they are grown specifically with immature harvest in mind. These baby greens can be harvested either in their entirety or in what’s called a cut-and-come-again bed by either scissor-cutting or by picking each leaf by hand. The latter are techniques by which the gardener harvests individual leaves off the baby plants, leaving the crown or growing point to regrow so that new leaves can be harvested again in a few weeks. (For detailed information on growing lettuces by the cut-and-come-again method, see the interview with Andrea Crawford on page 10.)
A bed of baby greens may be grown with only one type of green, say, all romaine lettuces, or the bed may contain a mix. Such a mix might include, say, three different lettuce varieties, arugula, a curly endive, and cress, all together in one bed to be harvested at one time. To grow baby greens in a mix, it’s critical that they all grow at the same rate and taste great in combination. Many mixes have a long tradition in France, where they are called mesclun, and in Italy, where they are called misticanza. In the past few decades gardeners have taken the baby-salad-mix concept and created entirely new mixes. A nontraditional mix might contain the heirloom greens orach, ‘Russian Red’ kale, and miner’s lettuces in combination with bok choys and lettuces, or a wild-greens mix.
Another option is to plant the different baby greens in their own small beds and then mix them in the salad bowl. With this method, you don’t need to be concerned about whether the greens are culturally compatible. While most salad greens grow well together in a mix, some of the choice baby greens do not. Two that come to mind are tatsoi and mâche. Tatsoi grows in a ground-hugging rosette and would be shaded by many taller greens, and mâche grows quite slowly and would never catch up with the rest of the greens. The information in the “Encyclopedia of Salad Greens” (page 23) covers which plants grow well as baby greens and which don’t, as well as which ones work well in a mix.
Seed mixes can be purchased at your local nursery or from specialty seed companies. Many of the seed mixes used by the seed companies are based on the traditional mixes. For instance, mesclun Provençal is popular in the Provence region of France and consists of various mixes of lettuces, arugula, finely curled endive, and chervil. This is a popular mix carried by a number of seed companies and is a good choice for beginners. Misticanza (or saladini), is usually a combination of lettuces and chicories. If formulated in a traditional manner, it would be too bitter for the American palate; however, seed companies in the United States choose a milder blend. The mail-order seed companies Cook’s Garden, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Nichols Garden Nursery, Shepherd’s Garden Seeds, and Territorial Seed Company all carry a number of mesclun mixes.
My kitchen assistant, Gudi Riter, steps away from her recipe testing to plant a small bed of baby salad greens, often called mesclun, in my front garden. First she prepares the soil by applying four inches of compost and a few cups of blood meal and bonemeal, and working them into the soil with a spading fork.
Once the soil is light and fluffy and the nutrients are incorporated, she sprinkles the seeds over the soil so that the seeds average from one half to one inch apart. She then spreads a half inch or so of light soil or compost over the bed, pats down the seeds and the compost to ensure that the seeds are in contact with the soil
Labels the bed with the name of the seed mix and the date. Gudi then waters the seeds in gently with a watering can until the soil is thoroughly moist.
Places a piece of floating row cover over the bed to prevent critters from destroying it. To make sure the row cover won’t blow away, and pests can’t get in under it, secure it tightly by putting bricks or stones at the corners and also along the edges if birds are a problem in your garden.
Of course, you can design your own salad mix. Just buy seeds of your favorite baby greens (remember that the plants need to grow at the same rate), stir all the seeds together in a container, and spread them in rows or in a wide bed. No matter how you grow the baby greens, an intensely grown garden bed of about fifty square feet will provide a very generous amount of baby greens for two people.
Prepare a small bed in full sun by working organic matter and soil amendments into the soil. (The information in Appendix A, page 92, covers soil preparation in its entirety.) Sow the seeds over the bed as you would grass seeds—the goal is to plant the majority of the seeds a half to one inch apart. Lightly rake the area to cover the seeds with a little soil. Pat the seeds in place with your hand, water the bed well, and cover the bed with a floating row cover to keep out marauding birds and digging cats. Secure it at the corners with stones, bricks, or boards. (For information on row covers see Appendix A.) Keep the bed moist but not soggy. Within seven to ten days the seeds should sprout. Water occasionally to keep the soil moist; as a rule, no fertilizing or thinning is needed. Within thirty-five to forty-five days the greens will be large enough to harvest.
Containers of young Asian greens including pac choi, shungiku, and mixed mustards are ready for harvest.
Japanese red mustard, grown as a cut-and-come-again crop, is also ready for harvesting.
A harvested mix of baby greens and edible flower petals.
A seedling bed of mesclun greens that are about two weeks old sits between a row of heading lettuces and curly endives.
interview
Andrea Crawford
Many people grow lettuce, but few do so with as much passion as Andrea Crawford. Andrea, who for years has grown lettuce for some of the best restaurants in the country—among them Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Spago’s in Los Angeles, and the Four Seasons in New York—takes pride in producing the incredibly succulent and dewy lettuces critical to the restaurants’ reputations for using fresh, seasonal ingredients.
Andrea oversees these gardens devoted to what she considers the best vegetable varieties, the most important culinary herbs, and the tastiest edible flowers. Her real specialty, though, is lettuces. After many years of gardening experience, she has perfected a productive growing technique of leaf-picking baby lettuces. She recommends this method or another referred to as scissor-cutting, or cut-and-come-again, because she feels that home gardeners can obtain high-quality lettuces using this approach.
Andrea is eager to share her techniques for growing and harvesting baby lettuces. “People ask why I don’t grow lettuce in the standard manner, why I bother with this intensive technique,” she said. “My immediate answer is, aesthetics. People in restaurants love baby lettuces, and my method allows them to preserve the shape of individual leaves. Garden lettuce is beautiful to look at; you can enjoy the lobed blades of ‘Oak Leaf,’ the undulations of ‘Salad Bowl,’ and the frills of ‘Lollo Rossa.’ If you’re going to grow your own lettuces, why not enjoy them to the fullest? Big lettuces taste great, but baby varieties, while milder and usually more tender, taste good too. This method is also an efficient way to produce lettuce in a small area.
“To grow baby lettuces using my methods, it’s critical to start with optimum exposure and weather conditions and, most important of all, very rich soil. At the gardens I work with, we place a premium on compost, making it as rich as possible by composting continually and digging in at regular intervals. Three times a year we add soil amendments: blood meal and bonemeal or cottonseed meal. I think organic soil amendments are best for growing anything—particularly lettuces, because lettuce can be very bitter if not grown in rich, humusy soil. We never have bitter lettuce because we use so much organic matter—and because the weather never gets very hot in my garden.
“The only pests we have are aphids and slugs. For the aphids we use an insecticidal soap. Slugs aren’t a problem most of the year because we’re there all the time to control them, but when they’re really active, we use slug bait on the perimeter of the garden, never touching the food plants.
“For our intensive method of growing lettuce, we don’t let plants get much bigger than three or four inches tall. When we sow the seeds, we space them about a quarter inch apart; then we never thin them. Because we pick them so fast and so often, we never have crowding problems as we would if we just left them to choke themselves and eventually self-thin.
“Optimum exposure and weather conditions are also essential to producing the best baby lettuce, so we take care to protect the plants in all weather. In cold weather we create tunnels of clear plastic film spread over PVC [polyvinyl chloride] tubing hoops; the plastic is attached to the hoops with giant plastic clips available from plumbing-supply houses. In warm summer weather we shade the beds with commercial shade cloth. Of course, winter weather doesn’t drop much below thirty degrees in either Berkeley or Los Angeles, and our summers are mild, but in cold-winter areas you could do the same thing in a greenhouse or cold frame.
“Because we produce so much lettuce for the restaurants, I’ve decided through the years against scissor-cutting; leaf-picking is easier on plants because the plants regenerate faster that way. We pick only the biggest leaves, which are still only two to three inches long, and leave the crowns to produce new leaves.
“Home gardeners can choose whichever method appeals to them, though. If you prefer the cut-and-come-again method of harvesting, take a knife or scissors and just go snip, snip across the plant about an inch or two above the crown. This won’t kill the plant, because enough energy and growing information is left in the crown for it to produce new leaves. New growth will occur in a short time if the weather is right—not too cold or too hot. Cut as much as you need and then separate the damaged leaves from the good ones. Scissor-cutting is great for home gardeners because it’s fast, but we leaf-pick each plant for restaurants and sort as we go so only the perfect leaves end up in the tub.
“Washing is an important part of the final presentation. Put the lettuce leaves in a sink filled with water, gently slosh them up and down, and then spin several turns in a salad spinner until the leaves are quite dry. It’s important to dry baby lettuces thoroughly because they’ll collapse under the weight of any water left on them. Put the leaves between damp towels and refrigerate immediately. Later, be careful to dress them very lightly with a delicate oil-and-vinegar mixture so they won’t sag under the weight of a heavy dressing.”
When asked which lettuce varieties she prefers most, Andrea said, “I think all varieties are interesting. There are all kinds of lettuces, and they’re fun to grow because they all look and taste slightly different. I’ve decided that the final product depends not as much on which varieties you choose as on how you grow them. There’s no such thing as a bad lettuce or a terrific lettuce; it’s entirely personal. Aesthetics are important; color, taste, and texture depend on what you want. If you like smooth, buttery, tender lettuces, go with ‘Limestone’ and ‘Bibb’ lettuces. For something slightly more crunchy and succulent, try the Batavians. Finally, in general, the reds may be a little more strongly flavored than the greens. All in all, it’s entirely up to your individual taste.”
harvesting from the salad garden
Salad greens may be harvested in many ways. The differences are dictated by the age of the plant, the method used to grow it, and the variety. Let’s first look at the different stages of a salad green’s life and see how to harvest each one. When you start seeds for most greens, you need to plant extra to make sure you have a full flat or bed of greens. Generally many more plants sprout than will fit in a mature bed, and selected baby plants need to be pulled out to prevent overcrowding. This process is called thinning. Once your plants have three or four leaves, you can thin them by cutting the baby plants off at soil level, or just pull the entire plant out of the ground. (This applies to some other vegetable seedlings besides salad greens too. Thinnings of beets, radishes, turnips, scallions, and peas are also good salad material.) Simply remove the root end, wash the baby plants, and add them to a mixed salad.
The method you choose to grow your greens also affects how you harvest them. If you grow a wide bed of baby greens, once the plants are three or four inches tall you harvest the greens either with scissors or with your fingers. You cut at least an inch above the crown so the plant will not be killed. Put the baby greens in a basket and bring them into the kitchen to be washed and served. After you pick your baby greens, fertilize the bed with fish emulsion; if the weather is suitable, they will resprout and be ready for a second harvesting in a few weeks. Sometimes they resprout a third time.
There is yet another method for growing varieties that head-up forming crisp, tight heads and rosette-type greens. Plant these varieties—such as lettuces, spinach, tatsoi, endive, escarole, kale, arugula, and mustards—in conventional rows. Your first harvest would be of the thinnings; then as the remaining plants became established (with six or eight leaves), you can harvest an outer leaf or so from each plant. Depending on the type of plant, once your plants reach mature size, you can either harvest the whole plant or continue to harvest individual leaves over a few months. As a rule, mature heading lettuces, cabbages, tatsoi, spinachs, curly endive, escarole, mâche, and arugula are harvested as entire plants. If you let them get too mature they will get bitter and develop a flowering stalk; this is called bolting. You can harvest individual tender young leaves off leaf lettuces, amaranths, Swiss chard, kales, and orach over a fairly long season. The perennials, dandelions and sorrel, are harvested over a number of years, either by picking a few leaves at a time as needed or by cutting back the entire plant a few times a year so new leaves will emerge a few weeks later. See the individual vegetable entries in the “Encyclopedia of Salad Greens” (page 23) for more specific harvesting information, especially for greens such as radicchio, escarole, and Belgian endive, which need special treatment.
All in all, a salad garden makes a wonderful beginner’s garden and provides a good selection for busy cooks. Few edible gardens can be as beautiful or as useful in the kitchen.
My salad gardens produce far more greens than I and my husband could ever use. Jesse Cool chef at the nearby Flea Street restaurant, visits and leaves with a few giant leaves of Japanese red mustard and a handful of lettuce leaves.
Jody Main my gardenmanager, harvests extra lettuces for a food bank.
the Creasy salad garden
My first official “salad garden” was in my backyard in 1984. In the middle of my small backyard is a huge but fruitless mulberry tree. For years I would stand staring at it and ask myself the same question: With all that shade and all that root competition, what edible plants can I grow under that tree? That spring it occurred to me that the area would be a perfect place for a salad garden. Leafy salad greens would grow in the cool sun of winter and spring, when the leaves were off the tree, and would do fine most of the summer and fall, when the shade of the tree would protect them from the heat. The problem of the mulberry’s invasive roots could be solved over time if I continued to dig up the roots and amend the soil every time I did a major planting beneath the tree.
I was right. A salad garden turned out to be the perfect solution to the problem. Not only did the salad vegetables grow well, but leafy greens interplanted with annual flowers also made a beautiful garden next to the patio. As a bonus, with a salad garden right off the kitchen, I found myself using many more salad greens than in the past, since it was so easy to harvest leaves as I needed them.
To prepare the area for the lettuces and herbs, I had the soil dug up under the part of the tree where the salad greens would go so as to remove as many mulberry roots as possible (something that is possible only when you have a mature specimen of a vigorous species). Then I added lots of compost and put in some low, pop-up sprinkler heads. To ensure a continuous supply of salad greens, my assistant at the time, Wendy Krupnick, set up a nursery area with starter flats so she could replant lettuce every six weeks or so. (We also bought seedlings from the nursery on occasion.) We found that starting lettuce plants by seeds in place in the garden sometimes resulted in spotty germination. Also, in watering the seedlings twice a day in the warm weather we were overwatering the tree and the more mature plants and contributing to fungus problems on the lettuces.
For more than two years we planted different lettuces and salad herbs recommended to me by restaurant gardeners and seed company folks. In the cool seasons all the lettuces, the chervil, the mâche, and the arugula did very well. On the other hand, for a short time in the hottest weather most of the greens did poorly; only the parsley and the ‘Oak Leaf,’ ‘Summer Bibb,’ and ‘Australian Yellow’ lettuces held up, but they needed to be harvested very young, or they would turn bitter.
It was certainly handy to have a salad garden right off the kitchen, but even handier was the method of lettuce harvesting that Wendy showed me. First thing in the morning, when the lettuces are dewy and the temperature is cool, she goes out and harvests enough salad greens for one or two days. She brings them in and washes and dries them in a salad spinner. (The salad spinner, a basket inside a plastic bowl, with a cover equipped with a spinning device, has to be one of the most useful modern kitchen inventions.) Then she dumps the salad mix into a plastic bag and puts it in the refrigerator. By picking the lettuces at their peak in the cool of the morning you ensure that your greens will be crisp and flavorful, and by washing them you make them available for use anytime, whether you’re grabbing a few leaves for a sandwich at lunch or making a salad in the evening.
I wake up to this view of my back patio When I moved the salad garden nearer to the kitchen I found myself harvesting from it more often. The rows of lettuce transplants shown here will be ready for harvesting in about a month.
At some point your baby lettuces will stop resprouting because the weather is too warm or because they are played out. You can prepare the bed for the next crop in two ways. The first is to simply turn the lettuces under, after which they will decompose quickly. The other way, which I prefer, is to leave the lettuces in place and gently plant your summer crops, like tomatoes and peppers, around them. This is called the “no till” method, and its benefits are that it cuts down on erosion and is easier on your soil structure. Another bonus is that the decomposing lettuces will feed your next crop.
After growing my backyard salad garden I became so enamored with these greens that in 1995 I designed a large garden full of them. It consisted of beds arranged between an array of planks encircling a birdbath. This garden became the focal point for the front yard. The salad greens and herbs were grown mostly in rows encircling what finally became called the “magic circle.” The rosettes of dozens of varieties of lettuces were interspersed with scallions, chives, spinach, mâche, and edible and purely decorative flowers. Of course, this garden produced much more than my husband and I could ever have consumed; it fed many of the neighbors, and we even had extra to take to the food bank. By growing so many salad greens at one time, though, I finally had a chance to compare many varieties and see how they tasted and held up to growing conditions in my microclimate. Alas, that garden is now gone—it went on to become a new garden, one filled with American heirloom vegetables and 18 flowers. I still grow many salad greens, however. They are interplanted among my other beds, in containers, and sometimes back under the tree near the patio.
My front yard “magic circle” salad garden in late spring provides us with copious amounts of greens, but also creates an exciting welcome to my home. There are salad greens in the containers by the tea house and rows of lettuces, endives, and scallions around the paths at the left. The beds at the right contain mâche (now in bloom and covered with tiny white flowers), nestled up to chives with their lavender flowers.
The magic circle is made of three-foot-long tapered boards that are connected by two concentric circles of bender board. After the greens were planted, laser drip tubing was snaked among the plants. Spray heads were used to irrigate the blue star creeper ground cover among the boards.
After years of growing hundreds of salad greens, I’ve found that I really enjoy mâche, miner’s lettuce, spinach, perpetual spinach, dandelions, many of the Oriental greens, and most lettuces. I’m less enamored with the strong-flavored arugula and shungiku greens, preferring to use them as herbs rather than as a chief ingredient in salads. Further, I find I seldom plant some of the heirloom chicories, as they are so unpredictable, and I still haven’t developed a taste for purslane (I’m put off by its slippery texture). In contrast, I’ve yet to meet a lettuce I don’t like. They are all so lovely and tasty, and each gives its own look to a salad. The romaines have a crisp texture, the butterheads are velvety, and the leaf lettuces are beautiful and tender. If forced to grow but a few, I guess I’d choose ‘Oak Leaf,’ the Batavians, and the velvety ‘Buttercrunch’; still, I’d miss all the others for all their great shapes and colors.
The same area as viewed from the front walk is shown about ten weeks later, after the greens have filled in.
The garden looks different when viewed from the tea house looking toward the front walk. Here rosemary, Japanese red mustard, Vietnamese coriander, and the blue flowers of an ornamental campanula create a background for the greens.
interview
Shepherd Ogden
Shepherd Ogden and his wife, Ellen, run a seed company in Londonderry, Vermont, where they specialize in salad vegetables and carry the seeds of more than forty varieties of lettuce. Shep’s family has grown vegetables for many years, and his enthusiasm for salad greens is obvious when he talks about them.
At one time Shep supported himself while writing poetry by driving a cab in Cambridge. Then in the early 1970s, during a summer visit to his grandfather, Sam Ogden, a garden writer who had a small market garden, Shep planted the garden for him. The work was so satisfying that he took over the garden the next year and sold produce to local restaurants and vacationers. Unable to obtain some of the specialty lettuces he wanted from other American companies, he started his own seed company a little while later.
Shep talked to me about the different types of lettuces, dividing the many varieties into categories. First he discussed forcing lettuces, which are grown in greenhouses or cold frames. “We plant forcing lettuces in our heated greenhouse in mid-February and transplant them to the outdoor tunnels in mid- to late March,” he said. “In Vermont that means harvesting in the middle of May. These types will grow in temperatures as low as fourteen degrees because they’ll actually freeze, unthaw, and recover. My favorite for forcing is ‘Magnet,’ a butterhead that forces exceptionally well.
“Most lettuces are spring lettuces—except for the overwintering types,’’ Shep explained. Spring weather is ideal for growing lettuces, and even summer and fall lettuces can be grown in the spring, although some spring lettuces will not tolerate the heat of summer or the cold of fall or winter.
“I like the big beautiful heads of ‘Red Sails’ and ‘Black-Seeded Simpson,’ which grows fast and tastes good. ‘Red Grenoble,’ another of my favorites, is a vigorous grower and can be cut as loose-leaf lettuce or left to head up. ‘Four Seasons’ is a good red butterhead and seems to grow a little longer into the summer than some around here do.
“For the summer ‘Esmeralda’ is a great butterhead with big, beautiful heads. We’ve had good luck with that even in the middle of the summer. Of course, our summers aren’t as hot as many; they’re usually in the seventies with some days in the low eighties. Occasionally we get temperatures in the nineties, but they don’t last long enough to really hurt the lettuce. And we always have cool nights.
“Other summer lettuces I like are ‘Matchless’ and ‘Buttercrunch,’ which have very nice heads; ‘Matchless’ is the darker of the two and has unique, triangular leaves. ‘Red Riding Hood’ is nice—it’s similar to ‘Four Seasons’ but darker and holds better in the heat. Of course, I must mention ‘Sierra,’ a butterhead type with a bronze tinge, as it’s the most heat-tolerant of all the varieties. ‘Craquerelle du Midi’ also holds well in the heat and is like ‘Buttercrunch’ but more open-hearted. I don’t care for the texture that much, but it’s popular among people in warm climates. People even write to us from Florida to tell us how well it does there.
‘“Diamond Gem,’ another summer variety, is my personal favorite at the moment. I planted a lot of it and found it did really well. It’s very heat-resistant—so heat-resistant that it almost fouls up our successions, because it can sit in the heat longer than most of the other lettuce varieties in the same bed without going to seed. But that makes it a good home variety, and it’s the best sandwich lettuce I know of.
“Of the fall/winter lettuces, I like ‘Winter Density.’ That’s like a large ‘Diamond Gem,’ but with row covers it overwinters here—or it grows well in the summer. ‘Brune d’Hiver,’ another nice winter lettuce, is more brown than red and is real hardy. That one overwinters here with no problem, but it has to be planted late in the summer to prevent bolting.
“Of the cutting lettuces, I like ‘Royal Oak Leaf,’ ‘Salad Bowl,’ and ‘Red Salad Bowl.’ I grow large amounts of these three side by side because they’re so beautiful and look so good in salads. The ‘Royal Oak Leaf’ gets bitter easily, though, and it’s more susceptible to disease than the others are. There is a red form, too, called ‘Brunia.’
“For other greens, we do fine with escaroles and endives, but chicories, which should be planted in the fall for a spring harvest in a Mediterranean climate, are really chancy here. ‘Sugar loaf,’ ‘Ceriolo,’ ‘Spadona,’ ‘Puntarella,’ and ‘Dentarella’ are all chancy, as are red chicories, the radicchios. We grow them on a spring/fall schedule rather than a fall/spring schedule, and I always leave some in the ground because I’ve discovered that they occasionally will survive the winter. We’ve tried forcing various radicchios as you would ‘Witloof,’ but they haven’t done well.
“Obviously, rocket [arugula] also needs to be included on the list of other greens,” Shep continued. “Its spicy flavor is a good addition to salads. I have no use for ‘White Mustard,’ on the other hand; it has a hairy leaf. I much prefer ‘Miike Purple,’ ‘Osaka Purple,’ or mizuna. Mizuna has beautiful cut foliage and a mild flavor. I also like all of the cresses. I sow the seeds often and harvest when they’re very small. I like mâche too. I prefer the big-leaf kinds like ‘Piedmont’ or the cup-leaved ‘Coquille.’ Then there is the whole range of minor greens that really make a mesclun mix stand out: miner’s lettuce [claytonia], golden purslane, minutina, shungiku, orach—the list goes on—we grow about forty kinds.”
As Shep’s strong ideas about varieties indicate, there are lots of options. Deciding which lettuces are best for your garden depends on your climate and season and on which ones enchant you the most!
‘Marvel of Four Seasons’ is a lush spring leaf lettuce that originated in France. It is sometimes sold under its French name: ‘Merveille des Quatres Saisons.’
