Salad Greens All Year Starts with Seeds Today

Fresh salad greens, kale, tomatoes, walnuts, cransins, and goat cheese can be a healthy addition to your diet. Build your own salad garden.

Fresh mixed greens with toasted kale, tomatoes, walnuts, cransins and goat cheese.

Salad Greens from the Garden are Good for You

A simple salad of fresh greens with oil and vinegar have been part of the Mediterranean diet for millennia. From 2700 B.C., ancient Egyptians associated lettuce with Min, the goddess of fertility. Romaine lettuce as in "Roman lettuce", is also called Cos lettuce as in the Arabic name "khas." Lettuce may be used as the bitter herb in Passover Seder. 

Packed with Nutrients, Salad Greens by the Numbers 

From the USDA National Nutrient Database for one cup of chopped greens.

Iceberg lettuce is not on the list. It is rather weak in the nutrient department. Add a couple of cold, refrigerated tomatoes is the opposite of a good salad. It is right up there with jello salad. I like a complex salad, one with a variety of fresh ingredients. I recently had such a salad at Mendocino Farms in West Hollywood. It was their take on a modern Caesar salad with superfood crunchies. 

Building a Better Salad Bowl

I've been working on making better salads at the TownHouse Gardens. One of the first things I planted in December on the Gro-Cart Hot House was two fabric bags of greens.

By early January I had green showing up.

One bag was arugula with cilantro and the other bag was a combination of various leaf lettuces with more arugula. 

When I need to make a salad, I harvest the tops of the plants, leaving the base to produce more greens.

This created the base of my salad.

I also used leaves from two varieties of kale.

I seasoned the kale leaves with olive oil, salt and pepper. Then toasted it in the air fryer. 

That will give the salad a nice crunch. 

Then I added fresh tomatoes.

Note the crunchy kale

Then I tossed in the remaining ingredients: Walnuts, cranberries, and goat cheese.

Variety is not only the spice of life but healthy too.

My salad bowl

Within a few days the salad greens in the garden are ready to be picked again for the next meal!

A variety of salad green seeds and a couple of grow bags can provide you with tasty and healthy salads all season.