Quick and Hardy Collection
I like to keep a tub of versatile greens by the back door. In winter, it is too dark and muddy to go searching in the garden for a dinner ingredient. Or in spring, the garden is too cold and mud-spattered for quick growth or appetizing salad greens. How many trips to the grocery store that tub of greens has saved me!
Gardeners often see their lettuce freeze out early in the winter. They wonder what they might use for winter greens besides kale (which they may or may not have planted last August.) Or they arrive at early spring with nothing in the garden and want something fast. This collection is meant to meet those situations: five greens and an herb for salads or light cooking that are hardier than lettuce and faster-growing than kale. It is based on Elliott Coleman's winter hoophouse production for salad mix in Maine--everything will sprout in soil that is 50 degrees or less. Selected from spinach, tatsoi, mizuna, chard, mizpoona, purple bok choy, miner's lettuce, erba stella, bekana, endive, and mache, with either cilantro or arugula as salad herbs. Six packets, at a discount.