Garden Herb Salad

Two weeks ago the lettuce and green onions were just sprouting. Here's a shot of how I've interplanted them.







Here are my arugula sprouts. They have a surprising bite to their flavor. We ate dinner at Soif in downtown Santa Cruz recently and they served a salad of fennel and artichoke hearts topped with arugula sprouts. It was delicious! But I'm saving these sprouts for something larger.


This is our first salad from the garden. We ate it Sunday night. Baby arugula, fresh chives, thyme, chopped basil and Italian parsley, violets and green onions. It was wonderful! The arugula is just the thinnings I took out of the rows. I have about two more salads worth of arugula thinnings, but I don't know. I may eat it all and replant for more baby arugula. I'm not sure that larger arugula leaves are as tasty as the smaller ones.

In the two pics above of the garden sprouts you'll see that they are emerging from rows of vermiculite. My grandfather, Norman Neibel, turned me onto vermiculite for seed germination because it helps keeps the seeds moist for longer periods of time and also doesn't form a crust that makes it difficult for the tiny plants to poke through. Most of my lettuces and other salad greens came up at exactly the time the germination periods indicated on the seed packets, if not before. The vermiculite works well, and you don't have to be too concerned about seed depth.