Fresh Salad

I so wish that I had managed to take a picture before we had dinner. John proclaimed it was the best salad he had ever had. It was topped with ground mild sausage from Grateful Growers and parmesan cheese, but the vast majority of it was something unexpected. Flowers, lots of flowers... nasturtium, chive, rose, and dianthus, along with their leaves, a small amount of sweet mixed baby salad leaves, sugar snap peas, fresh red beets, baby turnips, garlic chives, non-local broccoli tops and 2 small tomatoes, and some sweet clover from our yard.
It was so good that there was absolutely NO need for any type of dressing at all. And while I thought I was making enough for John to take to work tomorrow... we ate it all.
Small City Farms *just* started to sell this year, but they have helped transform our dinner table. I almost hate to blog it for fear that they will be found out and we will loose our little food supply! We buy them out of peas every time we see them, it feels like. I get to the market super early in hopes that I'll get to them first. They have been selling their salad greens mixed and washed already, with flower petals mixed in. So often the wonderful fresh veggies I get at the market sit around and end up with the worms. SCF has jump started me to really utilize what I am getting rather than thinking, "oh, this looks good!" and then later not knowing what to do with it.
(Pictured as sold!)
It has me thinking outside of the box and is propelling me forward to move beyond the standard American salad vegetables and adding all sorts of local fresh seasonal foods to our table. All I can really say is YUM. We are all loving this new diet. This is week 2 of a mainly seasonal table, and it's a good thing. I sure hope we can keep it up. It feels good in more than one way!
On a side note, we finally got our Earth Box set up and have added carrots and lettuce to it. I hope it grows for us, I think we might be *way* to late in the season already... but we will give it a go. I so wish we had more than the one. In the small bed, my kale has bolted and I need to figure out soon which herbs I have still, but John has his garden in place and growing strong. We have 4 tomato plants, 2 of them are Purple Cherokee. I bought one from Dean Mullis of Laughing Owl Farm thinking John had not planted one of those, but he had. We should be sick of them by the end of the year at his rate! We also have lima beans, various peppers, puff ball sunflowers, dragon's tongue bush beans, red kidney beans, watermelon, and marigolds. :) Yea summer!