Where is it chiseled in stone that every dinner, year-round, must start with a green salad — even if those greens must travel on carbon-spewing planes or trucks a few thousand miles from distant, industrial-sized farms irrigated by water stolen from someone else's river, or from non-renewable glacial aquifers? (I guess, on the same stone tablet that mandates a glass of orange juice to start each and every breakfast, even here in the frozen North.) I eat salad when I can get it fresh from my garden or woods. And boy, do I enjoy those first salads of springtime! With planning and a little imagination, I manage to make salad part of my diet almost without interruption from late April at least till Thanksgiving, without help from a greenhouse or grow-lights.

Three weeks ago, I had my first. Though lettuce and spinach were barely peeking out of the ground in my spring garden and scallions were not yet big enough to harvest, the woods yielded an ample supply of greens in the form of adder's tongue or trout lily. This is a plant I knew from childhood, from its shapely yellow flowers. The blooms are often few and far between, but the foliage is plentiful and, as I only learned a year ago, is eminently satisfactory as a salad green. These leaves are elongated oval and shiny, with smooth (non-serrated) edges. They are medium green in color, often mottled with brown, like the speckled surface of a trout's body. After garnishing them with fresh, minced oregano and mint leaves already up around the edge of my garden, and perhaps with a few early asparagus spears, plus finely sliced carrots and some rings of onion (both still in supply from last year's harvest), I was ready to feast.

Since then, I've added dandelion greens and a sprinkling of the young, tender leaves of wild grape, the latter available a few steps beyond the lawn's edge. Before long I'll be harvesting lettuce, spinach and parsley thinnings and the first radishes and scallions. To this may soon be added lamb's quarters, a common edible weed of gardens and lawn borders. In late June, the plump buds of the common wild day lily can be cut up and included in the salad bowl — not much flavor, admittedly, but they add texture, bulk and, presumably, nutrition. Dill and basil thinnings join the earlier herbs for extra spice.

During summertime, shredded red cabbage (a vastly under-utilized vegetable) and the usual retinue of mainstream vegetables such as cucumber, tomato, broccoli and bell pepper come into season, to which may be added purslane, another garden weed (and a succulent) that is abundant, tasty and nutritious. The big, yellow blossoms of most squashes, harvested early in the morning, and the blooms of the nasturtium, add edible beauty and class to any salad.

After the first hard frost in October, the salad bowl gets a little less extravagant. Green peppers and tomatoes, picked before the frost, will be around for a while yet, though most of the latter, harvested before fully vine ripening, will decline in flavor. Cucumbers will have long since disappeared, as the vines succumb to wilt long before summer's end. Finally, I'll be down to red cabbage, carrots, scallions and radishes, before the final head of cabbage is gone and, with it, my salad options.

Well into the summer, when ripe tomatoes are flowing from my garden along with green peppers and cucumbers, I treat myself to some authentic Greek salads as I remember them from my Aprils spent on the island of Crete, during the 1980s. If you want to try this treat, you'll need to find a deli or deli department that has fresh black olives and feta cheese, preferably fresh chunks swimming in vats of cold water, rather than prepackaged. Feta is not cheap, but you'll need only about one or two ounces per serving. The olives that most closely resemble the locally grown ones I remember from Crete are whole, "oil-cured" olives. (As with deboned chicken or fish, olives that have had their pits removed rapidly lose flavor.) In Greece, what we call "Greek salad" is known as (transliterated) "horiatiki salateh" (village salad).

The appropriate dressing is virgin olive oil (no vinegar) in which a liberal amount of dried oregano has been soaking for at least an hour, so that the oregano is thoroughly softened and its flavor well integrated with the oil. Excess oil, mixed with the juices of the tomatoes, will accumulate at the bottom of the bowl, and, when the salad is mostly eaten, this can be mopped up with pieces of Italian bread.

Cut up vine-ripened tomato, cucumber, green pepper and onion in a ratio of approximately 50-30-15-5. Directly salt all but the onion slices before combining in the bowl. No lettuce, carrots, radishes or any of the other usual salad ingredients go into this mix. As you layer up the pieces, sprinkle the tomato directly with finally chopped fresh basil, parsley or both. Add about five to ten of the olives per serving, then spoon the dressing mixture slowly over the salad so that all ingredients are liberally supplied. Top with a single piece of feta cheese.

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