The Multi-Vitamin Garden

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Soybeans

Of course, soybeans are the nutritional king of the dried beans-high in protein, calcium and vitamins. We discuss their cultivation elsewhere in this issue (see " The Most Important Food in the World ").

Peanuts

Native to Peru, these nutritional legumes are used to climates with 120 days of frost-free, sunny weather. Now, many of you will read that sentence and want to skip over to the next crop, but wait: There are peanut varieties that do well even in Canada! How so? Because while the nuts need warm soil for germination, the plants can survive light spring and fall frosts without suffering harm. Any peanuts you plant must be raw, with the skin around each seed still intact. You can plant them in or out of the shell. Since soaking them overnight in warm water helps them get off to a quicker start, "shell planters" may want to crack those coverings a bit and then soak their nuts, shell and all. If you live in a warm area, you can sow your crop directly into the garden after your last spring frost date. Folks in cooler climes can try starting peanuts indoors four to six weeks earlier. Use large pots - say, old paper milk cartons for this; the roots don't like to be disturbed. And space your plants about 18 inches apart. After the plants flower, they'll produce pegs that grow down into the soil and then form the goobers. So be sure to raise your crop in loose soil. (Peanuts don't, however, need a lot of extra soil nutrients.) You can even hill up the soil some around the plants to help the runners meet the ground that much sooner.

About 60 to 80 days after the pegs submerge, start checking your hidden nuts. When ripe, they should be deep pink - not pale pink or milky - with well-indented hulls. The plant leaves themselves will start to pale as the crop matures. It's a rare crop that grows up out of the ground only to return to it. Why not match peanuts' novel perseverance yourself? Give goober raising a try!

DGLVS

Almost all the dark green leafy vegetables (DGLVs) are nutrient-rich. However, spinach, beet greens and Swiss chard are also high in oxalic acid, which inhibits the body's full use of their calcium. For that reason, I'm going to bounce them from the "nutritional superstar" category and focus on four other - perhaps less appreciated - DGLVs: turnip greens, broccoli leaves, kale and parsley.

Turnip Greens

If you've been har vesting turnip roots and composting the tops, you've been throwing good nutrition away: the leaves are rich in vitamins A, C and calcium. Raising turnips (beets, too) is growing two crops in one.

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