A Simple Salad

The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth,

One is nearer God's heart in a garden

Than anywhere else on earth.

~Dorothy Frances Gurney, "Garden Thoughts"


I was out of town for the end of May, and when I came back the garden surprised me by how much it had grown. The strawberries were simply lovely and the peaches were like small green golf balls with a gentle red blush. Our lettuces looked lush and read to eat and the snap peas had definitely outgrown their trellises. James had done some planting while I was away, and also had harvested enough strawberries to make strawberry shortcake (73 grams)! Some of our tomato plants were also beginning to flower!

"Let's make a salad!" I said, excitedly, looking at everything growing. We had radishes and a variety of greens and strawberries and snap peas and peppery nasturtium flowers and, as always, sprouts!



Now, just so you get a sense of what weighs what, here's the breakdown of what I weighed (in grams) that morning (not all is shown in the picture above):

strawberries: 25
radishes: 67
flowers: 5
sugar snap peas: 34
lettuce: 69
salad sprouts: 252
purple bell pepper: 57
herbs: 19

We ended up making a salad in the morning and evening with all that we harvested! And check out the weight of the sprouts? Can you believe that? We harvested a total of 528 grams, and just about half of that was sprouts! Our conclusion: if you have to survive on a desert island for some short period of time, sprouts are the way to go.

A quick note on sprouts. We've been using a salad sprout mix... usually a combination of broccoli, alfalfa, lentil, radish, mustard, and clover seeds. (See earlier blog post entitled "Sprouts!" for instructions on how to grow them). We've also been sprouting mung beans. We haven't had much success with larger beans just yet. When the mung bean sprouts are ready (after about 5 days) we blanch them (put them in boiling water for 2-3 minutes), rinse them, then add them to pasta, stir fries, soups, etc...

Here are our salads:


Yummy!