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Winter salad

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.

Cut winter saladSome 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 greenhouseRocket 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 growingOriental salad mix growing in the greenhouse

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Extend your vegetable plot season

There was a time when I wondered why us gardeners worked so hard planning, preparing and tending our patches for rewards that last less than half the year (May to October). I would put it down to our passion for gardening. I now know that I got completely the wrong end of the stick, gardens are to be treasured, enjoyed and harvested throughout the year. With careful planning and preparation, you can have bountiful produce from the garden all year round.

Autumn is a key time to sow winter salad and crops for spring and early summer, usually I just sow broad beans and garlic. This year Suttons seeds website has inspired me to be more adventurous.

Broad bean, ‘Aquadulce Claudia’ is a delicious variety which harvests earlier than spring sown broad beans. Sow them directly into your vegetable bed and unless we have an extremely cold winter it should have no problems, if we do have that suspected freeze this year I’ll pop fleece over it for a bit of protection. Garlic seems to thrive on a cold spell and my autumn sown garlic is always a much heartier and healthy crop than weedy spring grown specimens. Plant the individual cloves pointy end up, 5 cm deep and approx 15 cm apart.

Garlic and broad bean seedsGarlic cloves and broad bean seeds

Planting broadbeansPlanting the broad beans, giving them plenty of spacePlanting garlicPlating the garic clove, 5 cm deep, pointy end up

The Sutton seed selection includes spring or salad onions, ‘White Lisbon’ which is winter hardy and should be ready in March and April. Peas, ‘Douce Provence’ is recommended for autumn sowing and hopefully we’ll get an early crop to look forward to in May. For the first time I am going to try and grow winter salad, instead of resorting to bags of super market salad. I am trialling the salad leaves outside and in the greenhouse; it will be interesting to see how they compare. I have sown a spicy oriental salad leaf mix which is advertised as ‘Speedy veg, ready in three weeks’, a leaf salad mix and Italian salad leaf mix, both come in seed tapes which are another first for me. They are easy to sow and I’ll be interested to see if the germination and growth is better with the seed tape spacing than my normal seed sprinkling method.

Autumn veg seedsMy autumn Suttons seed selctionAutumn sown peasSowing peasLeaf salad in seed tapePlanting the seed tapeOutside autumn veg sowingsMy outside autumn sowingsAutumn salad sown in the greenhouseAutumn salad sown in the greenhouse

I look forward to seeing the progress over the coming weeks and months.