I’ve grown malabar spinach the last two years, well the second year was just because it had seeded itself and came back up. I like it in soup or curries, but otherwise it can be a bit mucilaginous, which is a tough sell for my family. There are several Bangladeshi gardeners with plots near mine at the community garden and they grow and enjoy it as a staple green during the summer. I do snack on it as I weed, but so far haven’t used nearly as much as grows. Definitely worth trying.
I’ve also grown some amaranths which are pretty good sauteed with olive oil, garlic and a little salt and pepper. Pretty much the way I make most of my greens when cooked on their own.
Sweet potato greens are also very productive and pretty tasty. They are relatively mild. Very productive in the summer heat and I know people who will plant a bunch of slips closely and just keep cutting new growth for the greens. You don’t get much for potatoes that way, but bushels of greens from a smallish space.
I second sweet potato greens. They are very vigorous growers. I planted 16 slips last season and it about took over my whole garden. I ate some greens when we harvested the potatoes and they were actually pretty good. This year I’ll harvest greens all season to keep them a little more tame. In addition to the greens with that few slips we still harvested a little over 50lbs of sweet potatoes. I’ve tried amaranth and it always gets wiped out by something flea beetles maybe?? The little I did get was great!
I’ve gone mad with ordering semi-random seeds from everywhere and don’t know which I’ll actually plant yet, but this thread was timely because one of the themes I landed on in my collecting was greens/horta. I think I’ve ordered all but a couple of the plants mentioned above, and you’ve all given my a lot of encouragement with trying to find places for them all. I’m definitely more of a browser than a harvester at present, so the fresh-eats ones will probably be more successful for me this year. I’m pretty sure my refrigerator contains a black hole.
Viola leaves are a great replacement for spinach in any meal and excellent as “kale” chips. I harvest them by the forest, but it takes a while, since the leaves are pretty small.
I love flat leaf parsley as a raw green. It’s super hardy and becomes big and bountiful in fall. It self seeds and I let it grow “wild” in one of my garden beds…!
Sweet potato leaves are super tender and delicious.
Did you ever eat hosta sprouts? Not exactly a “green”, more like asparagus. Very yummy, but it takes years to establish.
I grow garlic chives, sweet potatoes for the leaves, Toona sinensis (Chinese mahogany), Nero di Toscana kale, Tronchuda Beira kale, tree collards. Of these the kales have the shortest lives, but Nero de Toscana will live 4 or 5 years. The others have long lives, but only garlic chives are good year-round. Sweet potato leaves best in late summer or early fall, Toona sinensis good only in spring. Garlic chives require the most effort to prepare, but they’re the best of all. Tree collards are the most productive and easy to use over a large part of the year but usually start dying back after five years or so. I’m speaking for SoCal.
Not sure if you are being serious or facetious. Apologize if it is the latter. Almost any paper I’ve read on the topic suggests a far greater degree of complexity. In many vegetables, cooking increases availability of fat soluble vitamins and minerals but decreases availability of water soluble vitamins. In other vegetables, little or no difference is present. Cooking type and duration also impact nutrition. Way too simplistic to say that one way is “healthier” than the other. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6049644/
I thought Orach was a perennial. Guess I will find out since I planted it last year.
I tend to throw out mustard and turnip green seeds randomly around my orchard. Breaks up the soil and reseeds itself.
I’ve got 13 raised beds, so not a huge area. It’s mostly perennial kale and asparagus. One bed walking onions. A small area in part shade has rhubarb and sorrel. Winter annual fillers I like are fava beans (for greens) and pak choi. I’m trying out claytonia and mache and may try sugar ann dwarf snow peas early spring. Warm season annual fillers I like are malabar spinach, fameflower, and basil. I’m planning to try orach, purslane, and some tatume squash this next year. Mostly greens. Good luck with your raised beds.
On the topic of purslane. It’s kind of funny, as persistent as common purslane is around here I thought maybe I needed my head examined when actually ordered a pack of Golden purslane seed and planted it a couple years in a row. It was a favorable experience though. It is a bigger plant/leaf than common purslane, more mild tasting, it grows in the heat of the summer, and most importantly at least in my garden was that it didn’t go nuts and spread like a virus throughout everything. As a matter of fact since I liked it I just let it seed and didn’t really worry about it, figuring it would just sort of perenially pop up here and there and I would allow it to remain when it was in a favorable spot, as this is what I do with dill and cilantro. But after a few years it sort of just dwindled out.
I planted it maybe 6 years ago or so in raised beds and let it go to seed. I since took out the raised beds and tilled some rows. It popped up in a couple dozen places. It might be hard to get rid of, but I don’t imagine wanting to. It doesn’t seem to be a resource hog, isn’t poky or unpleasant.
Miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) is great. It is a short lived annual, but reseeds by itself and could easily be a winter weed in the right area. It sprouts in cool weather and is one of the first greens here, then sadly dies over summer. My kids love to eat it raw (so do I). I can’t get enough of it when it is in season.
I’ll second stinging nettle. It is so amazingly good first thing in the spring and plentiful! Not so much fun when you back into it mid-summer ;). I had a patch in my garden that was fairly well behaved.
Good luck with your raised beds.