How to create the perfect salad

I love a good salad as much as the next person – and by good salad I don’t mean one of the pre-packaged lettuce, tomato, cucumber and grated carrot variety.

A wonderful part of growing your own veg and eating with the seasons is that you can make a salad out of just about anything edible in the garden. For example, thanks to all the rain, my broccoli plants are super leafy monsters. These leaves are just as edible as the florets, so it seems almost criminal to waste them. There’s also chickweed wandering amongst the garlic, flowers galore on the borage, broccoli and Asian greens, and even a couple of dandelions worth picking. Growing wild beside the path are a couple of huge ancient carrots – way past eating but their ferny leaves aren’t.

For me, there are four elements to a seriously good salad:

Super fresh greens (or purples) – think lettuce, silverbeet, Asian greens, cabbage, purple cabbage, beetroot leaves, cucumber, parsley, celery, fennel or coriander

Protein and good fats – nuts, seeds, avocado, olive oil – this balances the “greener” flavours and the fat increases absorption of vitamin K from the greens

Sweetness – try carrot, capsicum, apple, pear, grapes, tomatoes, strawberries, goji berries or roasted pumpkin

Acidity –a good dressing or vinegarette – it’s dead easy to make your own by combining olive oil and apple cider vinegar, like I have in the recipe below.

A great salad is just a matter of balancing the strong with the mild, mixing up the flavours and textures. Making it pretty and colourful honestly makes it taste better because of the messages good looking food sends to the brain, and all that colour also ensures you’re getting a wide variety of nutrients.

Use just a small amount of the bitter herbs and vegies like the dandelion, and finely shred the more robust leaves like the silverbeet. Include a good handful of nuts and seeds, and diced or sliced fruit. Smooth out the flavours with a good fat like avocado or olive oil, and a good dose of a decent vinegar for acidity.

Chickweed with dandelion flowers, carrot tops, borage flowers, broccoli and silverbeet

The below ingredients are simply what I had available in my community garden plot and in the pantry – substitute whatever you have handy in your garden or can pick up at the shops or the local farmers markets. Vegies that are freshly picked and in season are always best. If you want to save money but buy organic, I find my local farmers markets sell organic fruit and veg at half the price of the supermarkets.

I'd love to hear from you - what's your perfect salad combination?

My perfect salad with Spring flowers

Silverbeet (rainbow chard)

Broccoli leaves, florets and flowers

Tatsoi leaves and flowers

Borage flowers

Pumpkin seeds (pepitas)

Chickweed

Leafy carrot tops

Goji berries

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 tablespoon apple cider vinegar.

Put the oil and vinegar in a small jar, screw the lid on and shake well to create a vinaigrette. Finely chop the greens, add the vinaigrette and toss to coat – feel free to massage in the dressing using your hands to help tenderise the greens. Add the nuts, seeds and fruit and toss again. Decorate with the flowers and serve immediately. Really easy, really good.

Saying thanks with spring greens spaghetti

My wonderful dad just spent the best part of two long weekends building me a beautiful planter box for my courtyard. My response was to cook him this quick but gorgeous pasta dish. I’m normally a zoodles (zucchini noodles) or spaghetti squash kinda girl – both are great healthy options that would also work really well – but I chose to use good ol’ spaghetti for my dish for dad.

My courtyard planter box, freshly planted with a fig tree and herbs

This dish makes the most of seasonal produce, picked super fresh – colourful kales, broccoli florets as well as broccoli leaves. I’ve grown broccoli for years but it had never occurred to me to use the leaves until I saw them being touted as the new superfood. I was just happy to find out I could use so much more of the plant! Simply chop the leaves finely for salads or coleslaw, or lightly sauté them in a little olive oil or incorporate them into a stir-fry. The flowers are also edible – you can snack on them or use them as a garnish on salads or cakes.

Purple broccoli is my favourite as it's sweeter than green broccoli

Research suggests broccoli helps lower the risk of cancer, obesity, diabetes and heart disease while boosting overall health, giving you a healthy complexion and hair, increased energy, improved digestion and improved bone density thanks to the vitamin K.

A lot of people don’t like broccoli as they’re haunted by the overcooked, oversalted limp stuff of their childhood. But fresh, lightly cooked broccoli is amazing. Homegrown broccoli is so sweet it can be eaten raw straight off the plant.

Spaghetti with spring greens, garlic, pine nuts and lemon

Serves 2

Cooked pasta, zoodles or spaghetti squash

A handful of pine nuts

Several kale and broccoli leaves (or silverbeet, spinach, pak choy etc), sliced into ribbons

Several broccoli florets

Three garlic cloves, crushed or roughly chopped

The zest of half a lemon

Salt and pepper

Extra virgin olive oil

Heat a dry frying pan over a medium heat. Add the pine nuts and toss regularly for a few minutes until they start to brown as they toast. Tip the nuts into a dish and set aside.

Pour a seriously good slosh of olive oil to the pan, add the garlic and sauté for a couple of minutes – keep the garlic moving so it doesn’t burn. Add the broccoli and the other greens, using your wooden spoon to turn them over to coat them in the oil. Keep sautéing them for 3-4 minutes until the leaves have wilted and the florets are crisp but tender. Toss in the pine nuts, the finely grated lemon zest and sprinkle in some salt and pepper to taste.  

Serve immediately with your favourite pasta.

Spring greens spaghetti - quick, fresh and delicious

Breaking the rules for purple broccoli

There are some hard and fast rules when it comes to gardening in a climate of extremes like Canberra's:

• don't plant tomatoes before the Melbourne Cup
• don't leave your agaves outside at -7 degrees Celsius unless you'd like to see a plant melt
• don't try to grow sub-tropical fruit
• a week of 41 degrees Celsius will mean you spend more time holding a hose than seeing your loved ones.

So it was with a horror that only a mildly obsessed gardener would understand that I opened my Canberra Organic magazine on Saturday and read: "March: it's too late to grow brassicas from seed". It's important to understand here that I happen to grow a spectacularly sweet purple broccoli, so genuinely delicious that I haven't been able to stomach the store-bought variety for years. Broccoli and other brassicas are best grown for a winter crop, as it will be far sweeter, less sulphurous, and definitely far less riddled with the voracious caterpillars of the dreaded white cabbage butterfly.

It's also important to note that I'm the kind of Canberra gardener who bends the rules:

• I plant my tomatoes in late October
• I have a kaffir lime, chocolate mousse plant, and avocado tree, all of which are sub-tropical to tropical plants
• I have a stash of blankets with which I meticulously rug up my agaves and aforementioned sub tropical trees every winter
• good thing I like standing outside at 6am watching the sunrise - there's no getting around watering in that kind of heat. 

And given there was still one whole day until March, gosh darn it, I was going to sow some brassica seeds! Broccoli and other brassicas have tiny seeds, so they're best propagated in pots before planting into their final destination garden bed or pot. I'm trying a slightly different approach this time, swapping the usual seed raising mix for coir: coconut fibre that comes in a dry compacted block. I crumble some into a bucket with plenty of water and a dollop of Seasol for good measure. Five minutes later it's ready to spread into a shallow well-drained tray.
I've decided to plant broccoli, cauliflower, cavelo nero kale, and some white onion seeds as (Handy tip #1:) growing onions and other alliums near broccoli makes it taste sweeter. I use my own seeds, saved from previous crops, and originally sourced the seed from The Diggers Club – a treasure trove of heirloom vegies.

Kale and broccoli seeds - separated at birth

Handy tip #2: label, label, label. Broccoli, cauliflower and kale seed are identical, as are their seedlings, and nobody's memory is that good two months after sowing. I cut rectangles out of margarine containers and write the names on with permanent marker - it does fade in the sun so I refresh the text every couple of weeks. 

They're all small seeds so I sow them on the surface of the coir, then cover with a layer of vermiculite - a super lightweight mineral that helps retain moisture but doesn't stop the tiny micro-greens from pushing through to get that critical first dose of sunlight.

Bitter experience has taught me not to just plant a few seeds as you may end up with no plants at all. Besides, seed is far cheaper than buying seedlings, particularly when it's seed you've saved from last year's crop.

I sow the seeds thickly; if they all germinate I'll have enough kale to feed a small African nation, but I'm happy to gift excess seedlings to fellow green thumbs at the community garden, work, and in the family. The seeds need to be kept damp and warm in order to germinate. Given the nights are getting a little chilly, these babies are going to come inside each night so that the germination process stays on track.

In a few weeks' time, the first two tiny leaves will poke through the vermiculite, followed by the first "true" leaves that actually look like what the plant will grow into. When the true leaves appear, I'll use a skewer or fork to prick out the bubbies and transplant them into small pots, so they have room to grow to a size suitable for planting in the garden - about 15cm tall.
My purple broccoli will be going in the backyard rather than the community garden plot this year, as part of my crop rotation plan. And you won't believe it but (Handy tip #3:) even with broccoli, one of the great joys of home gardening is being able to wander out the back door, snap off a floret and munch down on this amazing living food.