What's in Your Salad?

I've planted seven vegetable beds in the "edible landscape" that is our front lawn here in the District of Columbia.

The salad greens are now in their full glory, two months after planting.


One bed contains 15 different varieties of leaf lettuces with wonderful names such as Red Galactic, Lola Rossa, Pablo Batavian and Red Deer Tongue. Together, they'd make a great rock band, I think.

At one corner of the house we have an accidental science experiment underway. As the sun crosses the sky, the corner of the house casts a shadow across a long bed containing mizuna and two different kinds of mustard greens. If you look down the row of greens, you can see very clearly how the leading edge of the greens--the edge that gets perhaps a half-hour more sun each day--has grown taller than the rest. In fact, the size of the greens continues to shrink--shorter and shorter--toward the trailing edge, a clear indicator of just how important sunlight is to the growing process.

These lettuces are what gardeners affectionately call "cut and come again," meaning you can snip some of the leaves for tonight's dinner, and they will grow back to be snipped again at a later time.

The colors range from a pale, seafoam kind of green to the most intense purple. Some of the lettuces have distinctive markings, such as the Spotted Lettuce, or swirls of greens, yellows and reds turning almost blue, such as the Prizehead.

Here are a few images.