Dandelions and chicory for early spring greens
When I pruned
and mulched the berries a few weeks ago, I left the dandelions that
had grown up in the row but threw a bunch of leaves on top of
them. My goal was to get sweet, blanched dandelion leaves with no
work, and my experiment succeeded quite well. Too bad there were
only a couple of plants there to work with.... I had to round out
my scavenging with plain old dandelions out of the yard to come up with
enough greens to slip into our early spring, all-from-the-garden omelet.
Although you probably
think I'm nuts, I hunted high and low for named-variety dandelion seeds
and ended up settling for chicory (aka Italian Dandelion). Since
they're perennials, both chicory and dandelions will feed you greens
long before any unprotected annual is regularly putting out leaves, and
this is the time of year when I'm willing to put up with a bit of
bitterness to get fresh food. Eric Toensmeier's Perennial Vegetables noted that some 
chicory varieties are
perennials while others are annuals, and I couldn't find any
specifically labelled "perennial" during my seed hunt, so I eventually
settled upon Catalogna Special and Red Rib from Johnny's. I'm
trying out both varieties, along with lovage, in the forest garden and
will hope that at least some of them become a self-maintaining
perennial addition to our garden.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Daddy --- it's a very different strong taste from arugula, though. Arugula is almost skunky while endive is bitter. I like the former, but not the latter.
Ikwig --- Good ideas!