A daily harvest of cut and come again salad leaves from the garden is one of the great pleasures of growing your own produce. Not only do you get beautiful fresh salad, there’s a fabulous range of flavours available from seed which you won’t get in the supermarket. It’s also really easy to grow and as you pick the leaves more shoot up giving you a constant supply. Until this winter, home grown salad was one of the joys of my garden from May to October; I turned to bags of salad from the shop in the cooler months. Last autumn I decided to experiment and see if I could grow year round salad.
Some Rocket just cut from the garden
I sowed several rows outside in my raised vegetable beds and in the greenhouse directly on the earth. The salad seed sown outside was a complete disaster, I sowed in October, the seed packet did suggest September so maybe an earlier sowing or a cloche would have helped. In complete contrast the salad in the greenhouse has been a great success, providing me with daily lunches and sandwich fillers all winter. The crop quality is fabulous, far better than my summer Mizuna salad that has a tendency to suffer pin prick holes in its leaves due to flea beetle (must confess it gets a good wash and we eat it anyway!).
Rocket growing in the greenhouse
My winter salad selections were Rocket, an essential in our kitchen as a side salad or an added flavour boost to a lunchtime sandwich, and a spicy oriental salad leaf mix containing Pak Choi, Mizuna, Mustard Red Giant, Mustard Golden Streaks and Salad Rocket. This has been a really tasty mix, the baby leaves are packed with flavour, you can also use them in stir-fry’s. I will sow a few more rows in the greenhouse which will see me through to May, when I’ll start cropping salad from outside. It’s satisfying to know I’ll never need to buy supermarket salad again.
Oriental salad mix growing in the greenhouse