Technique: Harvesting salad greens that stay fresh longer

Materials: sharp knife, plastic container, cool water, salad spinner, storage container or bag.

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How to harvest salad greens: 1. Use a sharp knife or scissors. I prefer a sharpened knife. Scissors can have a tendency to crush the leaf tissue, which can hasten rot. If harvesting head lettuce, cut at the soil level and remove yellowed or dead leaves. If harvesting salad mix, cut a few inches above the soil. 2. Put the harvested greens directly into a bowl, tub, or bucket of cool water. This cools the leaf tissue and prevents wilting. Also, this step allows slugs, sand, and dirt to fall to the bottom while insects and spiders to rise to the top. 3. Use a salad spinner to remove the excess water. 4. Store in a plastic bag or plastic ware. If using a plastic bag, be careful not to crush the greens in the bag.

What not to do: clench or crush greens in a bundle, this will bruise the leaf blades or midribs and will significantly shorten the shelf-life.

Cooking from the Garden

I'm always searching for new vegetable preparation recipes. One of my favorite things to do in the evening is to walk out into the garden and harvest today's dinner. For many years, I either worked for an organic vegetable farm, purchased a veggie share from a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program at a local farm, or grew an abundance of vegetables. At first, I had no idea to prepare some of the vegetables that I had helped to harvest for the farm's weekly CSA pick-up. It was a very worthwhile investment to purchase some vegetable oriented cookbooks.

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The List

Author	Title
Jack Bishop	Vegetables Every Day
Mary Beth Lind and Cathleen Hockman-Wert	Simply in Season
Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition	From Asparagus to Zucchini: a Guide to Cooking Farm-fresh Seasonal Produce

Winter Vegetable Production

Growing salad greens, leeks, carrots, and beets through a Wisconsin winter? Yes, it is possible. And, no, this isn't new. We are talking about season extension. Eliot Coleman, in his most recent book, "The Winter Harvest Handbook", provides an excellent review of season extension's history. French market gardeners, particularly in urban settings, have been blending seasons to extend the harvest for at least a century.

Why did I choose to embark on a winter gardening adventure? First, I have a passion for growing delicious vegetables and am committed to eating food that is produced locally. Need help going local? Check out this website to find your "Buy Fresh Buy Local" chapter. Second, I have always been fascinated with the art and science of season extension.

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Supplies:

Agribon 19 row cover, 10 ft. wide, available at Johnny's Selected Seeds

Electrical conduit, 10 ft. length, 1/2 in. diameter

QuickHoops bender, available at Johnny's Selected Seeds

Tufflite greenhouse plastic, 10 ft. wide, available at Johnny's Selected Seeds

Sand

Sand bags or small feed bags available in feed and farm stores

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Sources of information:

"Season Extension with Low Tunnels" article, written by Jean English at MOFGA, from Eliot Coleman's workshop.

Four Season Farm's website, owned and operated by Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman, has lots of information on their publications, resources, and suppliers

Growing cool, crisp salad greens mid-summer, is it an oxymoron?

What do you want to eat when you want to beat the heat? Well, I want a gigantic, cooling, salad fresh from the garden.

Generally, lettuce and salad greens tend to become bitter when days heat up beyond 90 degrees Fahrenheit and rain is a memory of spring. However, don't despair, a lush salad in July may be in your future.

These are my suggestions: choose heat-tolerant varieties, mulch with 6-8 inches of straw to conserve moisture, and irrigate. Johnny's seeds has an excellent selection of heat-tolerant lettuce varieties. Although, as a general rule, I avoid planting any butterhead types during the heat of summer. If irrigating mulched, heat-tolerant varieties isn't working for you, there is another tactic- shade cloth. An excellent, local garden store may have small sections of shade cloth for sale.

Beyond the realm of lettuce and spinach is perpetual spinach. This tough but tender green will stand up to the mid-summer heat without becoming bitter or rushing to flower, otherwise known as bolting. Cornell University has some great cultivation information. Fedco sells seeds for a reasonable price plus they have the most informative and entertaining variety descriptions in their catalog.

The delight of gardening

The moments when you are reminded of gardening's joys: yanking weeds, trellising tomatoes, smashing cucumber beetles between your fingers, and the blissful sound of water gushing through a rainwand. This past week has been an absolute scorcher in Wisconsin. I can't remember the last time we had rain. Typically, I work in the garden despite the heat but the one hundred degree temperatures sent me inside.

The cucumbers, butternut squash, sunflowers, and tomatoes have loved the heat. Finally, last night, the heat wave abated and we determinedly went to our community garden plot to trellis tomatoes and combat nasty voles. This summer, it has been an epic battle in a rodent-infested community garden. Two weeks ago, our absolutely gorgeous eight-inch tall 'Shirofumi' edible soybeans, also known as edamame, were clipped to the ground by several hideously obese voles. We had an extensive network of wildlife netting, firmly secured with landscape staples, that proved completely ineffective against the repeated onslaught of hungry rodents. This week, a rabbit had a lovely meal of 'Midnight Black Turtle' bean plants. Somehow, the 'Sarian' strawberry plants, that I started from seed in February, have escaped unscathed.

On a lighter note, this week's harvest: two 'Eight Ball' zucchini fruits, a handful of 'Red Norland' potatoes, several 'Poona Kheera' cucumbers, and a 'Calypso' pickling cucumber. Other veggies that were ready to harvest include: 'Beedy's Camden' kale, immature onions, swiss chard, young 'Ventura' celery stalks, Verbena bonariensis flowers, and 'Red-Cored Chantenay' and 'Shin Kuroda' carrots.

In the garden. . .

Beets, oh glorious beets! The seeds were sown on October 15, 2011, germinated in the fall, and survived the winter. I transplanted the seedlings to another section of the garden this spring and harvested them on June 2. I modified a recipe from America's Test Kitchen for the beet greens and used my favorite beet recipe from Jack Bishop's "Vegetables Every Day." The gist of the recipe is to use oven roasted beets, slip off the skins once the beets have cooled, and cut into 1/4 inch slices. I use a pie plate to combine some olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper with a whisk or just pick up the pie plate and swirl it around. I add the beets and top with chopped parsley and kalamata olives. The perfect summer beet salad!

The carrots, sowing date March 21, needed to be thinned. I planted three different varieties, all from Fedco Seeds, by the way an absolutely amazing seed company in Maine, 'Mokum', 'Red-cored Chantenay', and 'Shin Kuroda'. I observed the fastest germination and top growth for the 'Mokum' variety. The photo shows thinnings of the 'Red-cored Chantenay' and 'Shin Kuroda'. I had already thinned the 'Mokum' seedlings and just harvested some fabulous, luscious, early carrots yesterday, June 9. The taste of home-grown carrots is amazing. Grocery store carrot flavor is just a mere shadow of a garden carrot's along with differences in texture and knowing how that carrot was grown.

Garden failure/re-purposing of the week- I planted two white turnip varieties similar to the 'Hakurei' type on April 7, between two rows of trellised peas. The germination rate was great and I thinned the seedlings. However, the roots were lackluster, small, dry, and hairy. I ripped them all out and used the turnip greens. The poor, blighted roots are still languishing in my refrigerator.

Winter gardening in Wisconsin?

Since I walked into a minimally heated greenhouse, absolutely bursting with winter greens, in mid-February, I have wanted to grow in the winter. This wasn't a Georgia greenhouse, it was at Hampshire College's Farm Center in Western Massachusetts. Greens grown in the winter have deep flavor.

After several salads of deliciously crisp, sweet claytonia, mache, and mizuna, I started by reading several of Eliot Coleman's books. Cold frames were too expensive for a college student's budget and required tools along with skilled hands. I didn't have those ingredients. Several years later, in graduate school, a small greens patch in my community garden plot went through a zone 5 winter with a double layer of row cover. Then, I learned about unheated low tunnels on Johnny's Seeds website. Again, the crafty, wily, inventive Eliot Coleman had a solution. I found an article about a low tunnel workshop given at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardener's Association annual event, The Common Ground Fair. This was it- low tech, minimal investment.

Top, Tat-soi and arugula on December 11, 2011; Middle, Spinach, lettuce mix, and mache on January 6, 2012; Bottom, 'Tyee' and 'Bloomsdale Long Standing' spinach on March 20, 2012