Ugh, I just typed in a huge reply and lost it, hit the wrong button!

Here goes again, but a condensed version.

Two more greens to consider are arugula, which I have read contains a chemical toxic to cancer cells, and beet greens. These go well on sandwiches and the arugula in particular adds a nice zest to salads and chopped fine, can be added to cooked beans, like lentils. Not saying our kids will eat all of this, but we do.

We experimented with the garden this year and grew about five different kinds of kale, two of chard, arugula, beets, and collards (as well as the usual onions and garlic). The greens are great, but I do find they are tough, and thick, so they are best mixed into a salad, chopped pretty fine. We also sautee and steam them, with olive oil and sea salt, and the flavor is hard to beat.

We also bought one of those hand-held choppers, about twenty bucks, and you can chop greens, carrots, beets, cucumbers, etc. into tiny course chunks and it makes eating raw veggies and salad much easier. I would love to chop up a huge salad we could eat on for a few days, but it dries out, even in tupperware, so I usually just make it when needed. It takes a fair bit of physical work, though, using that chopper, but much safer than trying to chop those slippery veggies with a knife!

We have found many ways of using these greens, and they essentially can be used anywhere you would use lettuce, as long as you don' t mind the texture and different flavor. You get used to it, though, and you will LOVE how you feel. The arugula is actually a very delicate leaf, so its texture is like that of lettuce. Arugula in early season is delicious and you can eat a whole salad made just from that one green, but now, as the season is ending and the plants are going to seed, boy is it hot! A few leaves on a sandwich are plenty!

We got our seeds this year from organic and heirloom seed companies, and the did quite well. The Russian kale, a beautiful plant with purplish lacy leaves, is quite small and not a huge producer, FYI. But it looks great in the garden!

Another gardening tip shared with me this year, and what a difference it has made, it to use a fish-emulsion fertilizer (we buy ours in a ready-made concentrate from a natural garden store). It is a blend of fish emulsion, kelp, probably some manure, and it stinks but our kale leaves are bigger than my face, and that's just the leaf part, not including the stem! All of the plants have thrived, the collards look like something out of a nuclear test facility, they are even bigger!

Sorry to rant on, I love gardening and this year has been a great one. I think it is wonderful more people are interested in growing and eating from their own yards, it's hard to be more healthy than that. You can grow a pretty good set of greens from a big container, so even if you don't have a big yard, or any yard, you can still grow some of your own greens.