Thinnings: It's What's For Dinner

One of the fabulous things about growing your own food is how efficient you can be at using every last drop of the product at every stage. A commercial farm would discard, or maybe possibly compost, the millions of seedlings of lettuce, spinach, carrots, herbs and other produce that get thinned out when transplanting or in thickly direct-seeded rows. Me, I get to eat them, along with my weeds, volunteers, and just about anything else edible growing on the premises.

I've been eating thinned lettuce and spinach salad for weeks now, and tonight's bounty features a bowl full of mixed thinned basil--Genovese, sweet, lemon, lime, cinnamon.  The basil is in the oven right now, atop a bechamel sauce atop a quick pizza crust, all of it smothered under some local mozzarella.

Last night, I had pulled out some barley soup from the very bottom of the freezer--that time of year, when I'm in a rush to finish off what's left in there before this year's stuff goes in--and decided that some greens and cornbread would put together a good meal with it. Out to the garden, and scrounging around the beds I found three plants of golden chard, a couple small heads of radicchio, and a young red kale that had all reappeared from last year's plantings. I pulled them up, cut off the roots and chucked them to the chickens, and headed in to saute these 'weeds' in a little canola and sesame oil. A little splash of vinegar and sprinkle of sesame seeds, and they were just the right side-dish.

Of course there's the real 'weeds,' too -- uninvited specimens that are welcome into my kitchen nonetheless. My earliest seasonal salads are thick with garden sorrel. I'm not sure why this grows rampant in my yard, with it's tangy lemon or oxalic acid taste and arrow-shaped leaves. I suspect it came in on a load of topsoil bought to fill my original raised beds. I also use it to make 'weed soup' as my family calls it--an early summer treat of a creamed base, pureed potatoes, a bit of onion and black pepper, and copious handfuls of garden sorrel that turn it brilliant green.

More than 263 million pounds of food are thrown away in the United States every single day, according to the End Hunger program of the Society of St. Andrew. But that's not even counting the weeds and thinnings that never make it to the 'food' category--though they do make it to my dinner plate. Growing your own food enhances your own, and the nation's, food security because garden-grown food is used more efficiently, so we need less of it.