MELISSA RODEWALD, OF Century Farm and Nursery in La Center, has created unique, edible salad baskets made from more than 50 heirloom salad greens, herbs and edible, flowering plants. For more information, visit www.centuryfarmandnursery.com.
MELISSA RODEWALD POINTS out a few of her favorite plants inside her hanging, edible salad baskets, including the tender green leaves of this nasturtium flower.
FILLED WITH COLORFUL, edible greens, herbs and flowering plants, the Century Farm hanging salad baskets provide a summer’s worth of beautiful, healthy salad greens.
It’s a gorgeous spring day at the Century Farm and Nursery in La Center, and owner Melissa Rodewald is in her happy place – in her greenhouse, tending to a hundred hanging baskets, which overflow with tender young greens and brightly colored, edible flowers.
“I grew up on a sailboat, but I’ve always loved gardening,” Rodewald says, as she leads a visitor through the greenhouse, pointing out the plants she loves best: Spicy, pale green-speckled nasturtium leaves; dark green “Mayan Jaguar” romaine lettuce with its showy maroon spots; a cool kale-broccoli cross; tender, curling pea tendrils; and the wonderfully named “Drunken Woman, Frizzy Headed” lettuce with its mint green and mahogany red tinged leaves.
These are just a few of the unique, edible plants Rodewald puts in her farm’s signature product, the Gourmet Salad Garden hanging baskets. Filled with heirloom lettuce, salad herbs and edible flowers, the baskets can provide delicious salad greens all summer long and make a wonderful gift for friends who live in tiny spaces, but love the taste of fresh greens.
To Rodewald, who raised her own children on the greens she grew in the family’s kitchen garden, the act of putting the hanging salad baskets together is more than just a job – it’s a creative outlet. The baskets are edible, sure, but they’re also beautiful.
“I think of it as art,” Rodewald says. “To me, the leaf shape, the colors, the textures … all of those are things that I’m thinking about when I plan a basket.”
Rodewald hunts for new varieties of plants each year and can talk a customer through the more than 50 heirloom greens available in her hanging baskets. She lives on her Century Farm, just outside of La Center, with her husband, Doug, a commercial pilot, her son, Jonah, a senior at Hockinson High School (daughter, Katie, is living on her own and recently graduated from college). With its old farmhouse, horses in the fields, beautiful flowering trees and happy, yellow labs greeting visitors, the farm is idyllic.
“I love it here,” Rodewald says. “This is where I feel most comfortable … in the garden, my hands in the dirt.”
A stickler for pesticide-free and organic products, Rodewald knows where her seeds are coming from, and can assure buyers that their gourmet salad baskets are grown from seeds free of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and are not doused with synthetic pesticides or fertilizers. In fact, Rodewald makes her own organic fertilizer, which comes with each $30 hanging garden basket.
A regular at the Vancouver Farmers’ Market each Saturday, Rodewald also sells veggie plant starts – all grown from seed in organic soil Earth Pots, which produce healthier plants and don’t muck up the environment by using plastic containers – and can talk at length to customers about best-practice growing methods and how to care for their new plants or hanging salad baskets.
For more information about Rodewald’s Century Farm and Nursery, visit www.centuryfarmandnursery.com. To see more of Rodewald’s hanging salad baskets, visit her at the Vancouver Farmers’ Market on Saturdays or stop by her booth (Number 17) at the upcoming Clark Public Utilities Home & Garden Idea Fair, held April 24-26 at the Clark County Event Center, 17402 NE Delfel Road, Ridgefield.
