Design

We've enjoyed such great salads lately, it's hard to beat. My flats of salad mix, mesclun mix, pots of spinach, spinach in the ground, Tennis Ball lettuce in the ground, sown mesclun and arugula in various garden plots, and perennial French sorrel are providing totally delicious mixtures of lettuce, mustards, arugula, other greens, and spinach for our dinner salads (and my lunch salad greens on sandwiches, too). There are a lot of good 'salad mixes' out there -- all of our reputable seed companies provide their different custom mixes from spicy Asian to mild Salad mix. And some of them are even available in our big box stores (at least this season)!

In a optimistic mood, I sowed Treviso radicchio in the spring, thinking that I'd have nice small red leaves, in spite of the approaching summer heat. Unfortunately, Treviso radicchio turns red in cool weather, so I've had a lovely robust green patch all summer long; it's trouble-free but too bitter to eat without leaching out the bitter compounds before cooking, and then it's tough. I've left it in the garden as an experiment. I'm hoping that cool fall weather will mellow the taste, and encourage the leaves to actually look like radicchio. I had some lovely round heads a couple of seasons ago that were beautiful in the winter garden. So imagine my surprise when something started nibbling on a few leaves. We first thought maybe squirrels were using the flexible leaves in their summer nests, but I thought that the bitterness would deter them from too much activity. Yesterday evening, however, we had quite a surprise. The culprit (a cute female squirrel who...