Healthy garden salads are such compressed miracles

Whether as a main course or as a side dish: salad is popular and often stands as a symbol of a healthy diet. Above all, salads can be prepared in countless variations and thus offer the greatest taste sensations. Especially if garden salads from local cultivation supplement the assortment from spring. Consumers can then enjoy the different varieties of lettuce until autumn.

At this time, the offer - especially that from regional open-land cultivation - is particularly large and attractive. The heads of the garden lettuce are then beautifully compact, the leaves firmly. Just as gardeners and consumers like the vegetables they botanically view as rosettes. The rosette is typical of the garden salad plant. It arises because the individual sections of the stem axis do not stretch and the leaves remain close to each other. This was once vital for the original form of garden lettuce, the spiny lettuce Lactuca serriola, as a steppe plant in southern Europe, Asia Minor, North India and North Africa.

(Image: Christian Schwier / fotolia.com)

The leaf rosette dissolves only with increasing day length and temperature, or in other words: the salad "shoots". Depending on the variety, there are slight differences in the response to day length and temperature. However, the fact is that the changed environmental conditions change the one-year-old plant from the pure growth phase to the flowering phase. The sprout stretches and the numerous yellow flower baskets grow in panicles. With the extension of the shoot and the content of the whitish milk juice increases, which occurs in particular in the stems and inflorescences of lettuce. The plant serves the bitter substance to ward off predators and pests. In humans, it is desired only in smaller quantities in the leaves of the rosette. Incidentally, the genus name Lactuca derives from the Latin "lac" for milk.

Garden salad is low in energy and contains many important vitamins and minerals, especially in the darker leaves. The bitter substances lactucin and lactucopikrin stimulate the appetite. Even the cough and soothing substances of the garden salad on. The content of malic and citric acid also gives it its refreshing taste. Since some ingredients are fat-soluble, it is advisable to make the salad with a high-quality cooking oil such as cold-pressed olive or rapeseed oil.

It is worthwhile to explore the variety of garden salads and then enjoy the next shopping! Heike Stommel, bzfe