The Multi-Vitamin Garden

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I broadcast seed onto a prepared bed, being careful not to oversow. As leaves first appear, I thin them for use in salads, soups and stews. When the roots start crowding, I pull whole plants, often feeding the small globes to rabbits or chickens. Soon the remaining plants stretch their stems and the leaves get to be about six inches across. Then it's a snap to pick enough outer fronds for a meal, while leaving plenty of foliage to feed the plant roots. What could be easier?

Broccoli Leaves

Seems like most everybody knows how to grow broccoli, but few people realize that, like turnips, it's a multiple-use crop. Peeled and chopped stems are excellent stir-fried, and the leaves, make perfectly good cooked greens. Those fronds contain 16,000 IU (international units) of vitamin A per cup (three times the RDA). In fact, they're better for you than the plant heads are!

There's certainly more justification for the space broccoli takes in your garden if you use all its parts.

Kale

Kale's attractive greenery packs over ten times the vitamin A as the same amount of iceberg lettuce, has more vitamin C per weight than orange juice, and provides more calcium than equivalent amounts of cow's milk. It can be grown from Florida to Alaska with very little effort-it seems to thrive on neglect.

Like most members of the brassica family, kale is descended from sea cab bage, from whence it got those waxy, moisture-conserving leaves. It's a biennial, storing food the first year to help it produce the next year's seeds (that's why those first year leaves are so nutritious). And it's quite frost-hardy, lasting through winter in many locations - even under snow - to produce a second growth come spring.

To plant kale, prepare your soil, broadcast the seed and chop it in with a heavy metal garden rake. If conditions are particularly dry, you might sprinkle a thin layer of straw on top to conserve moisture. Kale grows best when mixed with organic matter and perhaps some lime in the soil. Plants thrive when thinned to about six inches apart and exposed to cool temperatures.

Young tender leaves are a delicacy. I chop them raw in salads or steam them as greens. But they achieve their peak flavor after the first frost. The clas sic Southern way to serve cooked greens is with chopped onions and a bit of vinegar, a sour-sounding but surprisingly sweet-tasting combination. The widely available Blue Scotch variety is high in vitamin A.

Parsley

That curled decoration on your dinner plate is actually one of the meal's most nutritious ingredients. If you're smart enough to eat those two sprigs of garnish, you'll be getting your RDA of both vitamins A and C.

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