INTENSE SALAD.

One day in May I made this TOTALLY INTENSE SALAD- and seemed to feel it was worth documenting at the time?

It’s romaine lettuce, red onions n grated parmesean cheese but besides that, everything else is from my garden. Yarrow, Nasturtium, Butterfly Pea, Plum tomatoes, sunflower petals. Very fresh tasting, and lots and lots of different flavors.

Nasturtium flowers are light and peppery. The leaves are much more powerful and definately a required taste. Nasturtiums are (theoretically) very easy to grow, preferring poor sandy soils to richer compost-based ones. A Nasturtium will make more leaves and less flowers in a richer soil. The require even moisture and, in my experience, are a little heat-sensitive.

Butterfly peas are really delicately sweet but otherwise flavorless. Both make great additions to a salad, visually speaking. Butterfly Pea is one of my favorite flowers, it is incredibly heat tolerant, grows fast and blooms often. It makes (edible, but terrible tasting) pea pods which make year after year propagation really easy. It will die back in the cold, can take a hard pruning, and will come back up in the spring. I did not get my hands onto the seeds until late one July, which is too late in the season for most ornamentals, but I planted them anyways and they have proved themselves to be tolerable of several strenuous conditions. I highly reccomend this plant to all Florida gardeners.