Greens with envy. And everything else

I embarked on this gardening project ready to learn. Boy, am I. I'm learning that the grocery store has given me a seriously skewed vision of produce. Take greens, for instance - the focus of today's post before I head to Raleigh to see Silversun Pickups. And if you don't know who that is, I'm not going to tell you. But you should know, if there's even the slightest sliver in there wanting to be cool.

Unlike many people, I like greens. Always have. So I planted four kinds in my two gardens: Kale, swiss chard (above), spinach and collards (I have lettuce in a planter on the back deck that I noticed has been stuck at about an inch tall since April. Might be time to move it out of the shade). Rumor has it you can also eat beet and radish greens, but I'm pretending that's not possible in light of the leafy inundation I'm currently under.

The good thing about greens is that unlike, say, radishes (bet you thought I could go a post without talking about radishes. You thought wrong), they produce constantly so you can enjoy them at your leisure. The bad news is that greens produce constantly so you'd damn well better enjoy them, at leisure or not.

Once that spinach got going, it GOT GOING. As did the kale and swiss chard. Four squares of greens is more than enough for two people, as I'm discovering, especially in light of two really key facts: If you don't continually harvest the leaves, they get big, tough and yucky tasting while also bossing all the other plants around them. And when you harvest the leaves, you have to eat them, preferably that day and certainly within two or three. I have no idea what chemical they use to keep greens viable for so long in the produce section, but without it the clock's a tickin'.

I'm cool with that, though. First of all, it keeps me on top of the garden and keeps me from wasting food, as I tend to do when I think I have weeks to eat those veggies I bought that often end up a foul-smelling goo in the bag. Plus, they just taste better this way. To that, I can now vouch personally.

Over the past two weeks, I've perfected crispy kale. I also did it with collards. Here's a link to the recipe, not that you need it. Just tear the leaves into manageable bites, toss them in olive oil, spread them on a baking sheet, bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes, salt and pepper, and chow down like they're potato chips. Seriously. You can't stop eating them.

Kale is also fantastic in stir fry. Kristy buys kits with all the spices in a little pouch (you know, to keep the landfills from getting lonely), but you could easily spice it up yourself however you like. The kale flavor just shines through, like it did for Woody when Frasier hypnotized him into liking "Veggie Boy." Here's a picture of pre-cooked, twice-washed kale. The discolorations on the leaves? Remnants of the flour-cayenne pepper mix I use to blow up the cabbage worms. More on that later.

I've also found a really good vegetarian recipe for the collards, used the swiss card ribs in a pasta dish and sauteed the swiss chard leaves with garlic and oil. Kristy is still baffled at my sudden interest in cooking, but it's quite motivating when it's your own food.

Here are a few more shots of the greens in questions:

The first multi-veggie harvest, radishes on the left and spinach on the right. Did I have to tell you that? Probably, if you don't know who Silversun Pickups are or haven't memorized the Cheers-Veggie Boy episode. This spinach ended up in a salad, as did as many of the radishes as we could stomach. A couple of days later we sat in the living room and ate the rest of the radishes with grim determination. Getting ripe simultaneously? Not one of the strong suits of radishes.

Kale, all oiled up and ready for baking. Geez, I hope I didn't just encourage Google to make this page appear on porn/drugs searches. Then again, what better way to increase page hits? Angry, disappointed page hits.

Chopped swiss chard, about to be sauteed.

Kale and collards at the start of my kale-collards crispy baking experiment. They tasted a lot the same. That's right, delicious.

Garden 2, in all of its crazy-growing glory. On the left is an accidental cucumber that appears to be on HGH. To its right, a cherry tomato with its first blooms. Towering over everything in the back is an accidental sunflower. I moved two others, but this was right in the middle and I just wanted to leave it. At the far right is the swiss chard square, and directly to its left is the spinach. The clustered growth at the top are blooms that I must snip if the plants are going to continue to grow edible leaves.

Collards. As I alluded to earlier, I've had the most trouble with collards because of those damn cabbage worms (see this post). The flour-cayenne pepper mix works, I think, but you have to apply it constantly. Also, turns our that flour doesn't rinse off in the rain. Quite the opposite, in fact: It forms some kind of horrific paste that eventually kills the leaves itself and is nearly impossible to remove before cooking. I've been encouraged to try Bt as well as well as DE, which I'm particularly excited about. How can you not be about something that shreds bugs with a microscopic powder made of fossilized water plants? Damn, we're clever.

I'll leave you, as usual, with a random shot of the yard. That azure flower is borage. That's right. I said azure, because this is a snooty herb we paid way too much for at an herb festival a couple of years ago so it can't possibly be just light blue. We had no idea how to eat it but we were of course wooed by its rarity and ridiculous price tag. Yes, I said a couple of years ago. That's why I was somewhat surprised to see it growing in a different part of the garden this spring. Turns out, this snooty herb spreads easily by seed (sort of like, gasp!, a weed). The flowers and leaves are used to spice up summer drinks (hello, gin-and-tonics with borage), and its presence is supposed to improve the flavor of tomatoes nearby. Guess what? There's a tomato nearby. Everything's coming up Millhouse.