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Show Vitamins Easy to Take In Home Garden Salad Larlle Hcatoe LetM Nutritionists stress the use of "green, leafy vegetables" as a source of vitamins not only for children, but for adults as well. You can follow this prescription in a most delightful way by serving at least once every day a tossed salad, made of vegetables fresh picked from the home garden. Children quickly learn to like the daily salad course, and so acquire a healthful habit which will improve their appetites and health all through life. In all civilized countries, a green salad is considered essential to the perfect dinner menu. Leaf lettuce is preferred by most chefs over head lettuce for salads. It is also far richer in vitamins. It comes in two types the butter leaves, and the crisp leaves. The butter leaves are thicker, and darker green, with finer flavor, the experts say. Crisp leaves are lighter green in color, thin and somewhat brittle. Examples are Black Seeded Simpson, a butter type, and Grand Rapids, a crisp leaf type. Experts give first place in their esteem to the butter leaves. Fast growing loose head varieties, such as Bibb lettuce are popular with many, Itomalne or cos lettuce, which produces oval leaves, standing upright, is highly esteemed by French salad experts. It is a good late lettuce, standing heat better than the leaf varieUes. The leaves can be bleached by tying them up as they near maturity, but this merely changes their color, and lessens their vitamin content. For summer leaves, chicory, also known as endive, is more available than lettuce, which usually runs to seed in midsummer. Endive may be had with curly leaves, or broad leaves. Many like the curly leaves best for summer, and broad leaves (esca-rolle) for fall, as they endure frost and become sweeter after the frost comes. Sow both types in drills, thin out to six or eight inches. Leaf crops grown in a similar manner, and much esteemed in bowl salads. Include corn salad, which is very hardy and can be harvested late in the fall; and upland garden cress, which gives a pungent flavor to the salad. In the fall lettuce may be grown again; and the Chinese cabbage leaves are delicious. Chinese cabbage may be grown In the spring, with rich soil and an early start. But in midsummer, it always runs to seed. A late crop has no such tendency, and heads are easily produced in the fall, from plants started in late June. All leaf crops demand rich soil. They must grow fast without check, otherwise the leaves are tough and have a bitter flavor. Plant food should be applied to the soil in which they grow at the rate of 4 pounds to 100 square feet. |