Kitch: Green Living

Danny Melius wants salad-eaters to think beyond iceberg lettuce. A favorite in restaurants, this crunchy staple contains small amounts of Vitamin A and Vitamin K—and it’s better than eating, for instance, french fries—but there are much more nutritious options for a salad.

Those options also have more flavor. 

“Most people here are used to salads that don’t really taste like anything,” says Melius, the owner of Nuke City Veg, a multi-locational urban farm in Amarillo. “Along with the flavor comes the nutrients, so when you have something bland, without a lot of taste, it means there’s not much in it that’s good for you.”

Most of that crunchy iceberg lettuce is also grown in California, which means it must be harvested, cleaned, and transported a thousand miles before those leaves make it onto a local plate. As soon as a crop is picked, it starts to feed on its own nutrients. The longer a vegetable sits on a truck or on a grocery store shelf, the more vitamins and nutrients it loses. Fresher is always better. “It’s going to be more nutrient-dense from your own environment than any imported stuff,” he says. 

That’s why, in a world of supply-chain issues and worries about commercial pesticides, a few local restaurants would rather serve locally grown greens. Melius has partnered with restaurants like OHMS Cafe & Bar, Brent’s Cafe and Blue Crane Bakery to provide greens grown in Amarillo. He also sells his produce directly to the public through local display coolers, including Salt Spices & Specialties in Wolflin Village, along with a summer presence at local community markets.

But at the same time, Melius always advocates for local gardeners to experiment with their own crops—and leafy greens are particularly easy to grow in this area, especially during the mild temperatures of spring and fall. These plants love cool weather.

“I call it the shoulder season,” Melius says. “Spring and fall and even into winter, or the tail end of winter, the temperatures are just right for [leafy greens].” 

They grow fast, too. A tomato plant takes all season to produce, and if something happens to that plant around August, an at-home tomato harvest might be ruined. But dark leafy greens can sometimes be harvested within just a few weeks of sowing the seeds. Once harvested, they’ll continue growing new leaves. (Eventually, summer heat causes them to bolt—sending up stalks of flowers—which means a reduction of flavor.)

“In the summer, I can get four or five harvests on stuff like my spring mix or lettuce mix,” he says. “Even if you have a failure, just clean out the dead stuff and spot-plant new seeds and you’ll have more in a month.”