Released: February 15, 2002

Also see: Early Spring, 2002 Yard 'n Garden news package

Today’s Upscale Salads Related to Old-Time ’Foraged’ Greens

MANHATTAN, Kan. – "Salads with substance" are a creative, sometimes competitive goal now for top chefs and upscale restaurants.

But gourmet gardeners can easily achieve similar results. In fact, they can start out with an edge: fresh-picked and thus flavor-packed ingredients. Plus, gardeners can choose whether those ingredients are the widely available and/or the wildly different.

"Today’s ‘salads with substance’ often turn out to be relatives of an old European tradition called pocket greens. Pocket greens are a mix of interesting flavors, textures, shapes and colors. Together, they create an out-of-the-ordinary dish – but in a good-tasting and very healthful way," said Chuck Marr, horticulturist at Kansas State University.

Pocket greens get their name from an old-time practice of gathering edibles while walking to and from a nearby market town or field. With a pinch here and a snip there, strollers could fill an apron or trouser pocket with greenery by the time they returned home for dinner, Marr said.

"Many of the salad greens we grow and buy today are newer varieties of what basically were weeds in Europe," he said. "Most of the mustard greens started out that way. So did cress and sorrel.

"Europe’s fields, forests and roadsides yielded the same combination of slightly sour and slightly sweet that’s typical of a modern-day ‘salad with substance.’ In many cases, all researchers have done is simply help those plants make the transition to U.S. conditions and become more productive."

Today’s gardeners can plant so that harvesting salad ingredients is still much like gathering pocket greens.

"Salad crops often do well placed here and there in the garden," said Marr, who is the vegetable crops specialist for K-State Research and Extension. "For example, they can go where you plan to plant annual flowers after the weather gets too hot for growing cool-season vegetables."

Seed catalogs and nurseries are beginning to make mixed-green gardening even easier to start. They’re greatly reducing gardeners’ what-to-plant decisions by providing pre-selected mescelun (mixed-green) seed packets.

Some suppliers even offer an array of mescelun choices that allows gardeners to select for specific qualities. For example, a packet may offer a subtle or "spicy" taste combination. It may include many colors of green or lots of red-leaf varieties. It may be all lettuces or all salad greens. It may be a mix selected for use in stir-fry cooking or to go with an Italian meal.

"If you don’t know much about greens, mixes are a good way to find out which of the more unusual salad ingredients you like. Once you’ve really studied seed catalogs or learned about the possibilities, however, you’ll probably want to design your own," Marr said.

He added that in the central United States, gardeners can plant some greens as early as March. Typically, however, they tend to plant in April. Either way, their harvest usually starts three to four weeks later. And the plants continue to send up new leaves, replacing what’s been picked, until summer hits.

"Salad crops are so easy to grow that I usually suggest them for teaching children to garden," Marr said. "You get quick results. Spring rains often do all the watering for you. You’re gardening so early in the season that you avoid almost all weed and insect problems. Generally, your biggest risk is that you may have to cover the plants for a night or two, if we have an unseasonably late cold spell."

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K-State Research and Extension is a short name for the Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service, a program designed to generate and distribute useful knowledge for the well-being of Kansans. Supported by county, state, federal and private funds, the program has county Extension offices, experiment fields, area Extension offices and regional research centers statewide. Its headquarters is on the K-State campus, Manhattan.

Story by:
Kathleen Ward, Communications Specialist
kward@oznet.ksu.edu
K-State Research& Extension News