Circle M Farm

Pretty pretty lettuces! To be specific: Red Sails, Buttercrunch Green, Simpson Elite, Red Salad Bowl, Green Romaine, Frisee endive, Bloomsdale spinach, Fireball and an Asian green called Autumn Poem, which sounds gorgeous but is quite dull looking in the field, worse still in mine as it’s being eaten by the dastardly flea beetle. But nevertheless, it’ll make good eating for us even with the tiny holes. All of these first fruits of spring make delicious eating, and better still, the variety in color guarantees a range of nutrients in addition to a lovely dish.

All lettuces aid digestion and strengthen the liver. Iceberg is pretty much a nutritional void, but the more color you see, the more nutrients you get. Dark green spinach is packed with lutein, which fights cancer and blindness. The romaine and red leaf lettuces hold beta-carotene, folate, calcium, and potassium. All are good sources of vitamin C and fiber.

These little guys are all tucked into my Early Spring garden, but sprouting up in my Summer Garden are the taller-growing Red Russian Kale, Blue Curly Kale and Rainbow Lights Swiss Chard, superstars for both color and vitamins. Whether eaten as small fresh greens or harvested later to shred and saute, these veggies are cancer-fighting phytonutrient powerhouses.

As with all produce, the fresher the better. Each day after picking, more vitamins are lost. Heat and light speed the decline. Even the cut surfaces of a head of lettuce bleed nutrients. Eating locally and seasonally make good sense in this context. So does eating large salads for meals during spring, rather than continually dissecting a head of lettuce for a week of small side-salads. Becoming a “localvore” might mean learning to eat veggies in greater quantities, but for a limited time, which goes againsts the grain of the high-choice global diet we’ve become accustomed to here in the Petroleum Age.

I’ve tended lots of gardens, both in my former Chicago city life and here in my Wisconsin farming one, but none has brought me the giddy excitement of this year’s Spring Greens Patch. I’m a sucker for color (it used to be my punk rock hair, now it’s my heirloom lettuce) and the sight of these many-hued, swirled and speckled leaves poking bravely up through the chilly bare earth warms my heart. I’ve always grown a few greens for our family, but I went crazy sowing lettuces this year since I was offering CSA subscriptions. Now I’m asking where they’ve been all my life! This time of year, there is nothing else so bright and cheerful in the vegetable garden. Later on, when we have bountiful colors coming on in tomatoes, eggplant, squash and beans, the weather will be too hot for lettuce. So now is the time to relish every tender bright bite.