Variety Salads Free for the Picking

Is your family bored with your lettuce salads? Would you like to expand the horizon of your taste experience? Save your grocery money and don't even buy seeds. Let Mother Nature grow some variety salads for you. Is your family bored with lettuce salads? Would you like to expand the horizon of your taste experience? Save your money. You don't need to buy the ingredients at the supermarket. You don't even need to grow them in your garden. Let Mother Nature provide the ingredients for some variety salads for you. Lettuce? What's that? I have not grown it in years, neither have I bought any. The extreme heat of prairie summers does not promote the growing of good lettuce. The same can be said for radishes. Our summer soils are much too hot for these plants. Unless they are sown before the winter to come up first thing in spring, you might as well save the money for the seeds. To tell you the truth, I sow only one salad ingredient, and that is mustard greens. All the other ones are either perennials or self-seeding annuals, and they are not the kind of ingredients which you would find in the usual North American salad. I serve a fresh salad once or twice daily in the summer, and no two of my salads are ever the same, because I have a long list of ingredients at my fingertips. Many of those ingredients would be labeled weeds by most people, but I learned to appreciate them as real food in 1945, when my family, along with millions of other Germans would have starved to death under the Russian occupation. Foraging in ditches was our only means of survival.

To weed or not to weed

I don't have any weeds in my garden. Volunteer seedlings are either pulled out within days of popping out of the ground, or they are left to grow big enough to be eaten.

To taste or not to taste

Children are quite adventuresome when it comes to experimenting with new tastes, provided that they are allowed to pick the plants themselves. Give them the same plants on a plate, and chances are that they won't touch them. Many adults are terrified that they are going to die of poisoning if they eat something from their gardens which they did not sow. The truth is that very few weeds are poisonous, and it is not too difficult to find out from the library or from your ag rep (in Canada) or your extension agent (in the US) which poisonous plants might be found in your area. Learn to identify them so that you can avoid them.
The copyright of the article Variety Salads Free for the Picking in Natural Health is owned by Traute Klein, biogardener. Permission to republish Variety Salads Free for the Picking in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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