STYLE / GARDENS : GLOBAL GREENS : A Gardener Digs Out of His Romaine Rut With Euro-Lettuces
Forget roses. Forget soil pH levels. Marcus Rosner is here to talk lettuce. Planting it. Tending it. Eating it. But not just any lettuce. In Rosner’s Rustic Canyon garden, the greens are pedigreed. He plants French varieties called Brun d’Hiver and Rouge d’Hiver and English Winter Marvel to harvest in winter. By spring, he’s tasting sweet Red Grenoble and Brunia from France and Red Riding Hood from Switzerland. Summer brings French Craquerelle du Midi, which he coaxes along into fall, when the planting cycle starts all over again.
Rosner, a jeweler and wine importer, recalls how a decade of travels in Europe revolutionized his idea of what a salad should be. In one restaurant in Alsace, for example, he remembers: “They mixed baby greens, chervil, snipped chives, walnuts, grilled goat cheese coated with bread crumbs, walnut oil, wonderful vinegar. All the flavors were indescribable!”
And impossible to find stateside, where romaine and iceberg set the salad standards. So Rosner brought seeds back from Europe and started his garden in a flat patch atop his hillside lot, where, thanks to chickens he’d once kept, the soil was rich. In the damp, cool climate of Santa Monica’s Rustic Canyon, lettuce will thrive nine months a year.
Since building a greenhouse three years ago, Rosner has extended the growing season even further. In the fall, he scatters seed around his plot by hand and, in winter, starts more seed indoors. As the weather warms, he brings out the hothouse seedlings, planting them alongside baby carrots and sugar snap peas. Brick borders, which Rosner stands on to weed and harvest, organize beds into jewel boxes, with fringed copper strips that ward off snails doubling as decoration.
“I love combining things for color and texture,” he explains. “The rows of bushy, reddish oakleaf beside narrow-leafed, lime-green Craquerelle du Midi beside frizzy, red-tipped Lollo Rosso ...”
For Rosner--and his wife, Jill--the harvest begins as soon as the leaves are a few inches long. He snips them one by one, instead of pulling up whole heads: “That way, every two weeks, there’s a new crop.”
Rosner has grown as many as 15 different lettuces at once but usually makes do with seven or eight favorites. “Red mustard is a little spicy; radicchio and arugula are on the bitter side; Lollo Biondo and Lollo Rosso [from Italy] have an earthy taste.” Sublime salads, he says, hinge on “the right mix of bitter and earthy with the fruity sweetness of the best olive oil and the sour tang of aged balsamic vinegar. We finish things off with cracked pepper--no salt--and good, thin-shaved parmesan. The flavors explode in your mouth!”
Since Rosner started farming, the Euro-salad, as it’s sometimes called, has become popular, and more home gardeners are growing exotic greens--one solution to the soaring price of even common lettuces. Domestic catalogues now offer the types of seeds that Rosner once brought back in his suitcase. And these greens are showing up in local markets.
For Rosner’s money, though, there’s nothing like the thrill of growing and picking his own.
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Best Beds
European lettuces are as easy to grow as domestic varieties. To plant your own, try these seed catalogues:
* The Cook’s Garden, P.O. Box 535, Londonderry, VT 05148-0535, (802) 824-3400.
* Thompson & Morgan, P.O. Box 1308, Jackson, NJ 08527, (908) 363-2225.
* Shepherd’s Garden Seeds, 30 Irene St., Torrington, CT 06790-6627, (203) 482-3638. (California phone: (408) 335-6910)
* Seeds Blum, HC33 Idaho City Stage, Boise, ID 83706, (800) 528-3658.
