The Harrowsmith Salad Garden: A Complete Guide to Growing and Dressing Fresh Vegetables and Greens

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

This is a book for those who approach salads with a wide-open sense of
adventure and an urge to experiment. Every aspect of producing salads is
covered, from history and folklore through selecting seeds, soil
preparation, planting, cultivation, harvesting, preparing, and serving.

There’s a lot more here than lettuce and tomatoes: the book
specializes in the unusual. It is a detailed introduction to exotic
salad greens and to flowers as salad ingredients. There’s excellent
coverage of mesclun, the latest gourmet fad in mixed-greens salads. Some
of the less well-known greens discussed include arugula, miner’s
lettuce, purslane, mizuna, and shungiku.

There’s a generous chapter on herbs. Again, the exotic makes an
appearance, and epazote, perilla, and mitsuba mix with the more familiar
parsley, mints, and thyme. Other salad vegetables are covered, including
blue potatoes, flowering kale, broccoflower, cereriac, finochio,
witloof, and dozens of more familiar species such as beets, carrots,
okra, and endive.

Recipes for salads receive considerable attention throughout the book,
emphasizing unexpected combinations, unusual dressings, and eye-catching
presentation.

The unusual subjects, large, full-color photos, and a relaxed writing
style make the book a natural for armchair gardeners, while the detailed
instructions make it a practical reference for experienced gardeners
eager to stretch their horizons.