It was a salad only a gardener could love. Handfuls of homegrown, tough arugula and bland spinach, yet it was a taste of spring. I made it last week, propelled by seasonal urges.
This time of year, we gardeners have a disproportionate fondness for anything that sprouts. The urge to harvest is especially strong. Gardeners are itchy, and the ground is waking up.
So on a recent spring morning, when the world seemed full of promise, I picked some arugula and spinach from my garden. They, like we, had weathered a rough winter.
Last fall, when I was buttoning up the small vegetable garden I rent in Druid Hill Park, I resisted the urge to yank up these plants and bury them in the soil.
"Let's see what happens," I told myself. That is one of the appealing aspects of growing vegetables. There are all these rules, such as every fall you should turn over your ground, letting the decomposed plants feed the soil. But from time to time, you can ignore the rules and experiment.
So last fall, I let the arugula and spinach plants live, covering them with an overturned wheelbarrow and the glass insert from an old storm door. I wished them well in the coming winter.
I looked in on them once, after the big December snowfall, and to my amazement the cold had not turned them into hollow sticks. Instead the snow was acting like insulation, protecting them from harsh winds. They were not exactly thriving, but they were green and, in the words of Monty Python, "not dead yet."
In the spring, when the snows had melted and the garden was mud, the arugula and spinach stood out. They looked like the comic strip characters Mutt and Jeff. The arugula was tall and spindly, the spinach short and squat.
In its prime, arugula is peppery. The book "Lettuce in Your Kitchen" by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby classifies arugula as a "mildly spicy green," similar to baby kale and Belgian endive, but not as potent as watercress, chicory or radicchio. Early last summer, the arugula I picked from the garden did add fiery notes to the evening salad.
However, the arugula I picked a few days ago was extremely strong. As I pinched a leaf off one of the plants and popped it in my mouth, I almost choked. It made every hair on my head curl. It had survived the winter but had become much coarser. The once pleasing rascal had turned thuggish.
The spinach, by contrast, was boring. It was never exactly Mr. Excitement in the taste department, but these leaves were decidedly dull. It had survived by sleeping through the winter, and I guess the plant was still snoozing. It wasn't much of a harvest, but my dull spinach and my randy arugula were something, And in the early spring, my standards for what constitute "a crop" are pretty low.
Joan Norman sympathized with my plight. I called her because she and her husband, Drew, are veteran vegetable farmers, growing all manner of organic crops on their One Straw Farm in Baltimore County. Their crops are sold at area farmers' markets, some grocery stores and to folks who sign up for their Community Supported Agriculture program or CSA, which, for a fee, delivers weekly supplies of produce.
Norman is a fan of arugula but conceded that it can be a tough green to love.
"The first time I ate it, I thought somebody's dog had gotten to it," she said. Now she is the green's best friend. In the summer, she makes salads with it, mixing its tartness with the sweetness of fresh nectarines. She substitutes it for basil and makes a pesto sauce with it. She has simple uses for it as well.
"Drew and I just put a little on a turkey sandwich; it adds quite a bit of flavor," she told me.
As for my rogue arugula, she suggested, "Use less of it, or mix it with spinach."
During our phone conversation, Norman took a seat on the porch outside her farmhouse. I heard a commotion in the background.
"That is the chickens," she said. Nothing was bothering them, she said, it was simply a nice spring day and nature was stirring.
She acknowledged that good weather affects gardeners as well.
"I am ready to eat something that is green and grown here," she said. The spinach is planted but won't be ready until June, she said. There are some lettuce plants growing in one of the farm's greenhouses, she continued, but her interest turned toward the asparagus plot.
"It might be poking out of the ground," she said, sounding hopeful. "Once it gets out of the ground, it grows fast; you can almost hear it growing at night."
After a long winter, she said, if "you see something green in your garden, you consider it edible."
Norman's words were rattling around in my head when I stood in my kitchen putting together my tepid spinach and bodacious arugula. I made a vinaigrette, mixing a clove of garlic with two teaspoons of Dijon mustard and two tablespoons of red wine vinegar, slowly adding 1/2 cup of olive oil, and finally a pinch of sea salt and pepper. I poured a dab of vinaigrette on the salad and took a taste. The greens were still pretty randy. So I mixed them with some store-bought greens and added a larger dose of the vinaigrette. That tamed the arugula and gave some life to the spinach.
The other day, I planted more arugula and greens in the garden. I am anticipating some fine salad days in the coming weeks. My spring salad was a rough start, more promise than performance. But that, I think, is the nature of the season.