Easy Early Salads With Perennial Greens: Free Patience Dock Seed Offer

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Patience dock is a wonderful addition to early spring salads, and is supereasy to grow. WILLIAM WOYS WEAVER

It's April here in eastern Kansas and all month I’ve been harvesting great salads thanks to five perennial plants in my garden:

• regular chives
• savory garlic chives
• nutty Sylvetta arugula (Diplotaxis muralis)
• lemony common garden sorrel (Rumex acetosa)
• rare patience sorrel (Rumex patientia), aka patience spinach or patience dock

Who needs to fuss with planting lettuce and spinach when these low-care perennial plants can provide such great salads? Plus, with the exception of patience dock, all these plants are readily available from garden seed companies. We are working with seed companies to add patience dock to their catalogs for 2010. In the meantime, we are offering free seeds to anyone who will sow the seeds (you can plant them in the fall; the harvest will be small from the first-year perennial plants), and then send us a report on how the plants behave and how you like the greens for salads and cooking. To request seeds, send a small padded, self-addressed envelope to the following address: 

Patience Dock Seed Offer
Attn: Heidi Hunt, Mother Earth News
1503 SW 42nd Street
Topeka, KS 66609

Rare Patience Dock

Patience dock is a terrific salad plant that anyone who enjoys salads should be growing. Heirloom veggie expert William Woys Weaver wrote about it in Zesty Sorrel: The Garden Green With Zing!, and he sent me a packet of seeds he had saved. No seed companies are currently selling it (but we hope to change that). The leaves are mild-flavored, thick like spinach but without the astringency that spinach often has.

Best of all, it is extremely easy to grow patience dock, and it's a perennial, so it'll come back each year on its own. It comes up very early in spring, so you can enjoy superearly salads. Instead of having to plant seeds each year, all you need to do is NOT let your patience sorrel drop seed (just snip off the flowers before they go to seed), or it can become invasive. As the leaves become large and perhaps tough, simply cut the plants back and new, tender leaves will quickly appear. Patience dock is an extremely long-lived plant, and is cold-hardy to at least Zone 4.