Sunday is the first day of spring! Hooray! The weather forecast for Sunday isn’t too spring-y; there seems to be a chance for snow, but don’t let that stop your rites of spring. It’s time to put away your turtlenecks, pack up your wool sweaters, store the Pendleton blankets and walk away from the winter recipes. It’s time to think about salad.
I got a jump on spring last weekend and bought some lettuces for my minuscule container garden. I bought four Romaine plants and four Bibb plants, and have nestled them into a couple of planters and I have been assiduously overwatering them ever since. My plants always get more attention in their first week than they will in the whole of July, sadly. I have not gone all Prince Charles on them yet – they do not seem to need me out there murmuring encouragingly.
https://www.epicurious.com/archive/seasonalcooking/farmtotable/visualguidesaladgreens
I wander out to check on their progress, hourly, it seems. I seem to need a lot of breaks. But at this stage, when everything is growing at the rate of a kudzu locomotive, it is an amusing diversion. The nasturtium seeds I planted two weeks ago have suddenly sprouted, and the morning glories emerged from the soil in just two days. I imagine that I will be giving the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum some real competition when it comes to nasturtium bowers this year. Mine will be humble, of course, since my staff is much smaller, as is my display space. And I am trying to focus on practical lettuce farming, anyway. https://www.gardnermuseum.org/gardens/courtyard/hanging_nasturtiums
While I will still have to patronize the grocery store and the farmers’ market, my little lettuce farm gives me a little frisson of radical independence. I am Laura Ingalls Wilder out on the prairie, making my way west; a rugged individual who can twist wheat into firewood, battle locust, win the spelling bee and serve up a salad of fresh tasty greens. When I take a pair of scissors outside to harvest some basil leaves I can comport myself as decorously as a Jane Austen heroine, with Mr. Knightley smiling benignly at my foolishness. I digress.
Lettuce can be the meal, or the bed upon which you, you madcap non-fictional character, can serve a more substantial ingredient or two. But you know what to pile on top of a salad. I like to rummage around the fridge and find leftovers. Tonight I’m serving up a little bit of steak from the other night. There isn’t enough to make a cheese steak sandwich, which would have been my first choice, though there is plenty to slice over some store-bought Romaine, with a slice or two left to give to Luke, the wonder dog.
And with summer fashions rapidly approaching like an oncoming mega-death meteor, I should consider the salad option more often. This salad vending machine concept would be a great item to have in my perfect imaginary world. I bet Laura Ingalls Wilder and Jane Austen would both approve, too. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/the-inconvenience-of-salad/382613/
Mr. Knightley and Almanzo would both have benefited from more greens in their diets. Back here on Planet Earth, I would say that you should get yourself to a nursery or a hardware store and stock up on some edible green plants since those vending machines will not be coming to our towns any time soon.
I will keep you posted on the progress our plants are making out on the balcony. Right now we have basil (which we used the other night with some yumsters Burrata cheese and fresh tomatoes), thyme, chives, two kinds of lettuce and nasturtiums by the boatload. We also have a couple of planters of purely decorative flowers: hot pink petunias, white dianthus, fuzzy Dusty Miller, some trailing variegated vinca major, and I have planted three seed packets of morning glories. I am still on the prowl for some lobelia. Isn’t it great to be outdoors?
“I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name ’em, I ate ’em.”
– Ray Bradbury
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