4/28/26
I was making doing my normal routine tasks, feeding the chickens, gathering eggs, checking and picking the asparagus while avoiding the mud from yesterdays rain, pulling some weeds to feed the chickens, and wondered over to the raised bed of beets and turnips. A few had smaller than a golf ball size tuber and were looking a little crowded so I picked one of each and headed to the house with my yard haul.
The eggs went in the basket used before washing when I have enough to mess with. The turnip and beet were washed, bulb and greens both. Of course I had to sample them since I don’t remember ever eating them this young and tender. The turnip was really good, but the beet needed a little something something to entice me to eat more. After remembering some seasoned rice vinegar in the cabinet, I went and gathered a couple more from the bed, diced and set them to marinate.
The greens from what I had picked were washed, sliced up, leaves and stems both. That was after googling to make sure they didn’t need any special handling to be palatable. Did you know beet greens are highly nutritious, packed with vitamins A, C, and K, as well as iron and calcium? Turnip greens contain the same, as well as folate and manganese. And since they were young and tender, very close in taste to some leaf lettuces I have eaten.
The next step was combining it all together to build a decent salad. The stems and leaves were cut up. A few asparagus stems were cut in about 1-inch sections and thrown in the bowl, the marinated turnip and beet mixture was added, and to finish it off, a nice drizzle of Italian salad dressing topped it off. In hind sight, a bit of parmesan cheese would have been a nice touch, but it was quite wonderful.
I definitely need to sow some more seeds, so I can have plenty of young greens to make salads with since I think I prefer this to regular salad. Not to mention I know where it came from, how it was handled, and know there are no chemical additives. Score!
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