Some Useful Winter Salad Greens.

Click the link for a list of plants.

http://www.permaculturesouthernhighlands.info/journal/wintergreens.htm



Some Useful Winter Salad Greens
Anne Pidcock has compiled this list of salad greens to grow and enjoy during the colder months.

Winter is often seen as a time for tucking into hot, steaming bowls of soups and stews, baked dinners and steamed vegetables. But winter is also a time when our bodies need the vitamins and minerals readily available in raw salad greens.

Centuries ago in Europe, winter and spring were traditionally lean times in the vegie garden, and peasants foraged along hedgerows and fields for fresh, wild edible greens. As well as augmenting their dwindling winter food supplies, these wild winter greens also represented a valuable source of nutrition.

Winter greens, characteristically bitter or sour in taste, are rich in trace elements, vitamins and minerals and confer innumerable benefits to those souls stoic enough to much their way through a winter salad. Improved digestion, blood cleansing and a stronger immune system are just some of the many benefits conferred by the humble weed.

To illustrate the wide variety of winter salad greens available in Australia, here is a random list of some of the more popular plants, both wild and cultivated. The plants listed are suitable for growing in a cool temperate climate, are frost hardy and can be picked on a cut and come again basis.

Serve salad greens by mixing your selection with a light dressing or drizzling with a hot, cheese sauce. You can also parboil your greens by cooking them lightly with two changes of water. Use the cold, cooked leaves, thoroughly chilled and chopped, in your salad. A relatively painless way of gaining the valuable nutrients is to add the leaves to juiced carrot or vegetable juice. For the more adventurous soul, leaves can be salted and fermented, like sauerkraut and served hot, with salt and pepper, lemon juice or yoghurt.

Most wild salad greens are bitter in taste but less so during winter. If the bitter taste is still too hard to bear, you can blanch the plant before harvesting by shielding it from the sun for about a week. Chicory, dandelion and plantain respond well to this technique and become yellow, tender & less bitter.

Before you lurch into hunter-gatherer mode and start scouring the fields for your next meal, a word of warning. Some wild greens contain nasties such as strychine, cyanide, oxalates, nitrites etc. and should never be eaten raw. Others, such as the much maligned Hemlock (Conium maculatum) have actually been eaten for centuries but only after being processed in such a way as to destroy the toxic elements, in this case the deadly alkaloid coniine.

In order to identify wild weeds correctly you need a field guide, such as Tim Low's excellent Wild Herbs of Australia & New Zealand. As a further measure of protection, avoid roadside verges which may have been sprayed with pesticides and shun polluted streams that are too close to stormwater drains.

Foraging for wild food can become an obsession for some but keep in mind that moderation is the keynote and a balanced diet should include a judicious mix of both bitter and more cultivated food plants. Happy hunting. Tweet