We are a family of impatient and over-extended gardeners, so we don't start lettuce as early as we can, or should, for our climate, and by the time we do, we're ready to eat those fresh greens now. The solution is to buy seeds and started greens at the same time. Plant the seeds, give them a good watering, cover them with wet burlap, and while they wait to sprout, your starts are already hale and hearty.

The clumps are the giveaway.




Salad burnett has a lovely peppery flavor. You can eat it on its stems or easily strip the tiny leaves from the stems for a more delicate texture.


Sorrel, a personal favorite - both for its vibrant purple ribs and its sweet and lemony flavor.


Mesclun greens, best eaten this big or smaller. Flavors range from slightly bitter and licorice-y (the serrated, long green leaves) to hot mustard (the purple and green mustard leaves) to sweet and tender (a looseleaf lettuce thrown into the mix).

But see? We are growing them from seed, too. Here's our new lettuce bed, which is well-shaded for the Texas heat. It is also somewhat sheltered by the nearby crepe myrtles, so we're hoping it will make a nice space for a makeshift coldframe to inspire us to finally buckle down and grow some winter greens next fall.


We have a lot of petrified wood.


Family stepping stones are a fun garden accent and a great project to help young children remember and celebrate their loved ones. This one was made during a visit by some dear friends, a couple and their then one-year-old son. You can find out how to make them today on Z Recommends.


Wonder how this back edge will turn out... not very weedy, but will the weeds love the new soil?

We supplemented the flavorful greens from our garden with some good old-fashioned foraging.


A discarded broccoli plant yielded some surprisingly tasty flowers that would add a great visual accent to our salad. It isn't even in a pot anymore! Flowers in salad are always fun, and broccoli flowers, as it turns out, are quite sweet.



Another depleted broccoli plant yielded up some spindly broccoli. Broccolini, I say. It's as tender and flavorful as the stuff you'd pay too much for at the grocery store.


Then we went hunting for one of my favorite greens of the season.


Would you believe it's in this picture?


Green briar, a prickly vine in our Texas climes, would hurt anyone but a goat under most circumstances. But the tiny green shoots? Delectable.


Preparing the meal took under half an hour, much of the time spent making a new invention of Z's - cut-out pieces of flatbread toasted in our toaster oven, which made fantastic croutons.



Setting the table.



A meal of fresh salad with balsamic vinaigrette, plus spicy chipotle field roast (fake sausage) for Mom and Dad, and garlic-stuffed green olives, acai and blueberry juice, and hummus for everyone.




A lovely way to start our spring!

In a season where tropical storms are sending long, slow, drenching rains to my corner of the world, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle seems particularly relevant. In the first chapter, she describes two very different attitudes toward rain: one, a cashier in the city who says it better not rain on the day she wants to wash her car, and another, a waitress in the country who hopes the rain will last a "good long" time. All of us have cursed the weather at some point, Kingsolver acknowledges, but if you're in touch with the land, you shrug off the inconvenience and bless the water that nourishes the soil where your food grows.

This is not exactly a gardening book, but it is a book almost entirely about gardens. It chronicles a year of transition for the Kingsolver family, who moves from Tucson to southern Appalachia as a result of a crisis of conscience. They were uneasy about the amount of resources and time spent trying to coax life out of the desert soil, and they wanted to see if they could live year-round on their summer property in the more fertile mid-Atlantic region. Between gathering wild morels, hosting a party with a triple-digit guest list, and pawning off bags of zucchini on unsuspecting neighbors, their adventures are hilarious and poignant. A spring of hard work and anticipation is followed by a summer of staggering plenty, a fall of bustling preparation and a winter of cozy comfort and a stocked larder.

Readers can learn from Kingsolver's mistakes and successes through her gorgeous, meaty prose, though she doesn't offer very specific how-to advice in terms of planning and execution; more than anything, however, this is a book that will inspire you to take joy in the daily drudgery of chores like weeding and watering, reconnected with your final goal of eating the healthy, wholesome food you helped raise.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was a family effort: there are numerous lengthy sidebars written by Kingsolver's husband, Steven Hopp, a professor of environmental studies. They tend to concentrate on the political and economic ramifications of eating locally-grown food, so I found them an unwelcome interruption to Kingsolver's lush narrative, but after I had read the whole book, I returned to the sidebars and found them very informative. Each chapter ends with a few seasonal recipes, a sample weekly meal plan, and some thoughts by Camille Kingsolver, Barbara's daughter, who writes in a similarly engaging manner to her mother's. And it's Lily, Camille's little sister, whose hands are featured on the front cover; the beginnings of her lucrative chicken-egg business provide a sizable chunk of the story, too.

The book's title has the distinction of being both creative and fitting. The family's adventures with livestock and produce are well-detailed, certainly, but it is Kingsolver's clear belief that life itself is miraculous that makes for an uplifting reading experience. Cold is the heart that fails to leap when, in the final chapter, her efforts to breed turkeys the natural way (99.9% of turkeys are artificially inseminated) are rewarded with the sound of faint, high-pitched peeping from inside of a warm, trembling egg.