July 9, 1996 Contact: Jennifer McNulty (408) 459-2495; mcnulty@ua.ucsc.edu

FREE UCSC WORKSHOP JULY 20 OFFERS TIPS ON GROWING SALAD MIX

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--At $5.99 a pound, salad mix can be a pricey taste treat, but if you're like so many consumers who have become hooked on the stuff, consider attending a free workshop on July 20 to learn how to grow your own for a fraction of the cost.

Orin Martin and Christof Bernau of the UCSC Farm and Garden will offer the first-ever Salad Garden Workshop on Saturday, July 20, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Alan Chadwick Garden on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The workshop will cover seed selection, sowing, cultivation, and harvesting of salad mix, and there will be a taste test at the end.

Salad mix, known as Mesclun in France and Misticanza in Italy, is a mixture of diverse greens and edible flowers that are grown quickly and harvested early to create delicious salads. Although salad mixes appear to have caught on in the last few years, they have actually been a staple around the world for ages, offering high nutrition as well as good taste and texture. Lettuce, by contrast, has a relatively low nutritional rating.

Ingredients hail from a wide array of plant families, but some of the more popular greens include arugula, kale, osaka, pak choi, broad and curly cress, mustards, spinach, beet leaves, chard, lettuces, endive, radicchio, dandelion, chicory, dill, parsley, leaf celery, and sorrel. For the home gardener, edible flowers enhance the sight and taste of a mix. Popular flowers include nasturtiums, rose petals, borage, and calendula.

The diverse ingredients create some gardening challenges, as maturation rates vary from as few as 20 days for mustards to 90 days for radicchio and endive. So save yourself the headaches and mark the calendar for July 20, when you can learn from the experts.

The Alan Chadwick Garden is on Coolidge Drive across from the Stevenson College parking lot, where free parking will be available. For more information, call (408) 459-4140.

This release is also available on the World Wide Web at UCSC's "Services for Journalists" site (http://www.ucsc.edu/news/journalist.html)

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