The salad without end

There is something quite sublime about walking in the backyard barefoot to pick my lunch.

This is my second summer gardening in Seattle.  Once again, my tomato plants are big wimps and the okra has all died but two in the windowsill (one is covered in aphids).  I’m still trying, but my big champions this year are radishes and salad greens.  The radishes I didn’t even plant.  I got a bunch of random plants a few winters ago from a woman in Burien who needed to thin out her wild garden on a steep hillside (talk about a green thumb–her soil was all rocks).  I promptly forgot what she gave me and I planted them all last summer, didn’t want to pick them and let them go to seed.  The magical radishes went to seed, overwintered without a problem.  The also withstood the tiller this year and I now have somewhere in the vicinity of about 20 radishes growing randomly in the garden.  I never buy radishes because they usually taste gross and old in the market.  But so lovely is the crisp fresh taste of a just-picked radish.  If anyone needs some, please stop by.
Also, I never bothered with growing salad greens or lettuce before–somehow it just bored me…yes, I’m a vegetarian that is bored by salads and veggie burgers.  It’s just so generic and overdone.  I’m excited by salads only if there is an interesting dressing or other components such as toasted nuts, avocado, cheese–anything besides leaves in a bowl.  I bought some mesclun seeds and planted them every few weeks and they have grown faster than Matt and I can eat them.  This is a good thing because I’m experimenting with salads and eating my greens more than ever before.  I’m even experimenting with salad dressings, but don’t have any that I really love as much as balsamic vinegar and olive oil.  So if anyone has a small patch of dirt, I recommend planting some mesclun–the seed packet is about the cost of a bag of mesclun at the market, but it will keep growing, and growing and I still have more seeds to plant.
I will post a good salad dressing when I find one I like.  Picky, picky.
Please share one with me if you dare.

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