Truly a Garden Salad

Collecting Chard In The Yard!

It's hot today (...hot for Seattle anyway...) and we wanted something light to eat. I stepped outside with a pair of garden sissors, and collected a bunch of chard, a few tomatoes, some herbs and mint. These went into a board chopped up. I added a can of garbanzos for protein, and the last of the homemade ricotta. To dress the salad, I added a little brine from a jar of olives, plus a few of the olives, then oil and vinegar. We're done!
The bulk of the salad came right from our yard, and let me add that it was remarkably little work for most of the elements. Tomatoes do require care, but it's a meditative sort of thing tying of the leaves an so forth, so it doesn't really count as work. The other elements (chard, mint, herbs) were basically "plant-and-forget"; they are nice-looking enough to be floral elements in our yards, as well as a food source.
Much of the rest of the salad was tag-end leftovers, which a frugal person enjoys to use. Only the oil & vinegar and the garbanzos didn't fit into this category; I was careful to toss the garbanzo can into the steel scrap bin, so eventually it'll be re-used (...and when we take the bin to the scrap yard, we'll get something like a penny for the can, based on weight. It's not riches but what-the-heck.)
I can't imagine being a subsistence farmer; that would be way too much work for little old me. But as today's salad shows, doing a little bit on the side is fun and healthy.