Rainbow roots
The classic house salad employs the color of red tomatoes, green cukes and maybe a slice of purple onion to please the visual palate. But a variety of unusually colorful beets, radishes and carrots can be the root of a salad with true pizzazz. Once you’ve experienced the rainbow of color available in root crops, your lettuce will never look the same. Beets, carrots and radishes can be planted weeks prior to frost, as soon as soil can be worked, and provide a welcome early-spring harvest. They need a loose, friable soil in the garden, but are also easy to grow in containers in a sunny location. Try the green-skinned, red-fleshed ‘Rose Heart’ radish, ‘Watermelon’ (skins are whitish and when sliced or quartered reveal a deep-red heart) or ‘Easter Egg’, which produces a mixture of skin colors including pink, red, purple and white. Try ‘Golden’ or ‘Touchstone Gold’ beets, which have red skins and bright-yellow interiors—great marinated and sliced for salads, and they don’t “bleed’ like red beets. ‘Bull’s Blood’ is a more traditionally colored red-rooted beet, but it sports reddish-purple leaves that make colorful salad greens. A wide variety of colored carrots exists, including ‘Purple Haze’, an All-America Selections winner with purple skins and orange centers. It is beautiful sliced, shredded or peeled. Immature ones with their leaves intact make a lovely garnish. The lemon-yellow ‘Amarillo’ is one of several yellow carrot varieties.
Some reputable sources of seeds mentioned here:
Johnny’s
Selected Seeds
(877) 564-6697
www.johnnyseeds.com
Pinetree Garden Seeds
(207) 926-3400
www.superseeds.com
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
(417) 924-8917
www.rareseeds.com