Winter Greens

The beauty of winter is that it lets me be a negligent gardener. The rains take care of watering, I don’t need to fight bugs (the most destructive one apparently take the cold months off), and I’m not constantly picking beans or cucumbers to keep the plants producing.

I do little more than pick kale, pull radishes, or behead a cauliflower plant when I’m ready to cook. But my favorite is the lettuce patch (the background for the header, above), a mix of arugula, mizuna, oak leaf, Bibb, and romaine lettuces. I sprinkle the seeds in a planter in September, water until the rains start, then leave it alone. The lettuce patch grows slowly through the cold months, providing ready-to-go salad until May’s heat renders the leaves too bitter to eat. It never runs out, no matter how much of it we eat. And it makes an excellent salad, tossed with nothing but a bit of vinegar, good olive oil, and salt and pepper.