"Too many simple green salads suffer from a lack of imagination." ~ James Beard
"A Southerner would fry a salad if he could figure out how." ~ Joe Thompson
"If a man prepares dinner for you and the salad contains three or more types of lettuce, he is serious." ~ Rita Rudner
Apologies to Southerners but good to start salad season with a little humor.

The salad in the image above came together as most of mine do: what’s available in the garden and commitment to a color palette. This salad was a synthesis of arugula, romaine lettuce, beet thinnings, kumquats, purple carrots from the garden with additions of red onion and roasted pistachios.

One recent garden task was to snip out the extra beet plants that emerged from the single seed. I washed the thinnings and added them to several salads. The color and twists of the stems add interest to the greens.

The above were fortuitous additions. Kumquats were off-blooms and the carrots were harvested late last spring and carefully stored in the produce drawer of the fridge.

Last night’s frittata summoned red pepper from the freezer, thyme and parsley from the garden. Enviably, a friend with a south-facing sunny garden still has tomatoes.

Here’s my take on The Enchanted Broccoli Forest (a riff on Mollie Kaizen’s cookbook) where 17 broccoli plants are growing together in a 4 x 8 x 2 foot raised bed. The heads are in various stages of development and I’m anticipating one will be ready to harvest in a week or less.

Reluctantly, I’ll abandon the colors of autumn after Thanksgiving. But then there is the expectancy of Advent for my Sunday church entry bouquets.

I squeezed in a dozen spinach plants between the beets and the snow peas. They’l be harvested early as their neighbors enlarge. I also seeded some kale and more lettuce in trays for succession plantings. Check my What I’m Planting Now page for details.

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