Tag Archives: salads

Happy New Year!

01 Thursday Sep 2022

Posted by in container growing, gardening without plastic, kitchen garden, sustainability

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Nope – not quite crazy (yet). It may be September and only barely autumn, but the veg grower’s new year starts here.

My list of crops to get under way for the new season right now includes autumn-sown onions, hardy broad beans, spring cabbages and salads – lots and lots of salads.

Rosso di Treviso chicory – sown densely to harvest young as baby leaves

I grow my salads in big containers, and in one square-metre veg bed just by the gate where it’s handy to pick. This is a really good trick for squeezing lots of variety out of a very small space – and with salads you rarely need very much of anything at a time, so this is a technique I’ve used in large gardens and small.

My square metre salad bed is made of reclaimed scaffold boards, cut into metre lengths then screwed onto uprights, 5cm x 5cm and cut about 15cm longer than the width of the boards – this means you end up with something that looks like a box on short legs. Use a mallet to knock these into the ground, checking to make sure it’s all level, and your raised bed is ready to use.

Rocket by name… rocket by nature! These were up within a week

Mine is filled with a 50:50 mix of home-made garden compost and soil dug out of the garden – so it’s 100% sustainable, zero plastic and pretty much zero carbon as there’s no transport required (apart from by wheelbarrow). You can of course buy in soil improver instead of the garden compost (while making a note to self to make yourself a compost bin/wormery/bokashi bin asap); and topsoil is likewise available from the garden centre if you have to.

Divide the space into roughly equal sections: in this case, nine squares, roughly marked out with canes. I am getting mildly annoyed with this setup now though as I keep knocking them out of place: when I get a moment I will screw some short screws into the top edge of the bed so they’re sticking out, and tie string to them in a grid to mark out the squares instead.

I’m relying on bamboo canes to divide up the space at the moment, here keeping mizuna in check

So I have nine varieties of salad growing in this space:

  • ‘Marvel of the Four Seasons’ winter lettuce raised under cover till they’re seedlings (safer from slugs) then planted out once large enough
  • ‘Rossa di Treviso’ chicory – sown direct and harvested as baby leaves when they’re not as bitter
  • Coriander – sown direct (as it always should be)
  • ‘Red Frills’ mustard sown direct – this has grown much faster than everything else and is prolific but delicious. I can’t quite keep up with the harvest so I chop it back occasionally and add what I can’t eat to the compost heap.
  • American land cress: a great watercress substitute that needs only damp soil to thrive. It’s easy as anything: sow direct and it keeps you going right through winter.
  • ‘Moss Green Curled’ parsley: sown direct, and just a few seedlings up so far, but then parsley is notoriously difficult to germinate and even a few plants is enough to fill a small square after all.
  • Rocket – the clue is in the name: lush green seedlings to snip young rather than letting it get too peppery
  • Claytonia – one of my favourite winter salad ingredients, a curious succulent leafy green that’s very easy to grow (sow direct) with a crisp texture and a sweet, fresh green flavour
  • Mizuna: about as easy as it gets. Indestructible and very tasty oriental salad leaf: sow direct and harvest young.
The Red Frills mustard is going a bit bonkers but it’s absolutely delicious so I don’t mind that much

The trick is to make sure it stays damp, feed with high-nitrogen home-made nettle feed weekly in summer and perhaps fortnightly in winter, and harvest regularly: you should get 2-3 cuts from each square before it’s finished (for lettuce, harvest leaf by leaf). Then when you’ve finally picked the last from each square – I’ll probably be picking this lot till early spring before it’s spent – clear the square, add a few handfuls of home-made garden compost like a mulch, and resow each square straight away to keep the crops coming.

Dreaming of winter

02 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by in greenhouse, kitchen garden, seeds, self sufficiency, sustainability

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Winter salads on the way…

In the garden, it’s August: the pumpkins are swelling, the beans are coming thick and fast, and I’m feasting on courgettes, tomatoes and cucumbers.

But in my head, it’s October, or maybe November, and I’m thinking about my winter salad supply.

As the lovely students on my course, Self-Sufficient Veg Gardening will tell you, I’m big on planning. Stay one step ahead of the season and you’ll give yourself the best chance of a veg plot that’s pumping out the produce month after month, all year round.

So right now, though the summer harvest is in full swing, I’m pulling out the seed trays and taking to the potting bench again to get my winter greens under way. At this time of year seeds germinate quickly, and there’s time for them to grow to picking size by November, when the cold weather hits. Continue reading…

August flowers

15 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in exotic edibles, Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, herbs

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Proof that we’re about a month behind where we should be at this time of year: my garden has suddenly, spectacularly burst into flower. Even though it’s August, when everything’s usually looking a little saggy and tired and definitely more green and brown than colourful.

This is either what my borders should be looking like in midsummer, were I a properly organised gardener giving due consideration to year-round colour: or it’s what my borders would have looked like in July, had it been a normal summer.

Oh hell, I don’t care, I’m just enjoying it for what it is. For once I am spoiled for choice as to beautiful things to photograph for Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, hosted as always by Carol at May Dreams Gardens. And I couldn’t be happier.
 

Pumpkin ‘Atlantic Giant’ in the tropical edibles border: its huge plate-like leaves are looking gorgeous snaking around the feet of some ruched near-black Cavolo Nero kale. I’m experimenting with edible planting with an exotic feel and this one is a real winner.
Malva moschata var alba

The brilliantly-coloured if rather thuggish daylilies are also a feature of the tropical edibles border: they don’t have a variety as I inherited them (and have been digging out great clumps of them where they’ve invaded neighbouring territory ever since). I am forever weighing up the pros and cons of getting rid of them altogether: at the moment, when they’re looking this lovely, they’re for keeping I think. 

Garlic chives in full flower

Another thug with no name which I harden my heart against while it’s just a big, ugly, strappy clump of leaves shouldering everything around it into oblivion: then it flowers and I lose the will to take action yet again. I love crocosmias but my goodness they’re difficult to live with.

Nemesia which survived the winter in the chimney pots flanking my patio and are flowering their socks off once again

Geraniums: or should I say pelargoniums. I’m very rude to them every year and call them my old-lady plants but they just flower on regardless and defy all my attempts to ruin them with blatant neglect.

I rather like this one, though. Nicked as a cutting from a client’s garden many years ago and still going strong.

Rosa ‘Wildeve’

The two-tone flowers of Nicotiana mutabilis: I overwintered mine this year in a frost-free greenhouse on advice from Chris Ireland-Jones at Avon Bulbs and it’s worked a treat.

Geranium pyrenaicum ‘Bill Wallis’ coming back for a second charming flowering: it’s never really out of flower, actually, and is one of my desert-island plants I wouldn’t be without

Cichorium intybus: otherwise known as chicory. I first saw chicory flowers on the Hooksgreen Herbs stand at one of the shows a few years ago and fell in love with it: now I’ve planted chicory all through my herb garden and it looks just lovely.

Tropaeolum majus ‘Ladybird’ forming a gorgeous frothy pile in the salad garden

Also in the salad garden the dill has flowered like big yellow fireworks in one corner: you’re not supposed to let them do this, as it means you can’t use the leaves any more, but they do look spectacular

And a little further along the same row there’s another froth, this time of coriander which has run to seed rather spectacularly all along one side. It’s very unruly and flops right across the path but it does look lovely: and I’ll be saving the seed for use in cooking and also of course to sow next year.

Bagging my salad list

28 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by in herbs

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Gone are the days when we were satisfied with a limp lettuce leaf or two plonked on the plate.

Love them or loathe them, bagged supermarket salads have opened our eyes: we now know the delights of a salad full of colour and texture, with not only lettuces but also herbs, and a range of flavours from mild and sweet to spicy, peppery or bitter.

One of the many reasons I leapt at the chance to join VP’s 52-week Salad Challenge is that I’ve never quite managed to organise things so that I have a good mix of salad ingredients to pick at any one time.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised I was looking for my perfect, home-grown supermarket bagged salad. Without the bags, without the chemicals, and without the carbon footprint.

But more than the environmental benefits, I want it to be more interesting than the actual ones you buy from the supermarket; more personalised than the salad seed mixes you can buy from the seed companies. One made just for me.

One problem: deciding what to grow. Well – where better to start compiling a shopping list than the ingredients list on that bag of supermarket salad currently languishing in the drawer at the bottom of the fridge.

At the moment, mine is a standard issue Florette Mixed (I like Florette as it’s one of the few brands which states where the ingredients are sourced – and that’s the UK, and Lincolnshire in particular, all year round, it seems. Why others are so coy about where their salads are from I’ve no idea. Could it be they’re shipping it in from halfway around the world even though we can grow it here?)

Ingredients: Frisée lettuce (we know this as curly endive: it has a pleasantly bitter tang, and needs blanching), iceberg lettuce and radicchio which adds a splash of burgundy to the green. Right: that’s three on this list, although last time I tried to grow iceberg it refused to heart up.

Florette’s Crispy adds lambs’ lettuce to the list but omits the Iceberg. We buy both, can’t remember which I prefer (maybe that should tell me something, though).

From the rest of their range I like the sound of ‘Four Leaf Salad’: that’s Lettuce ‘Can Can’ (frilly, green, new one on me but widely available), lambs’ lettuce, red butterhead (this one from T&M looks really good) and something they refer to as ‘red multileaf’ – I’m taking that to be a mix of red lettuce such as Lollo Rossa.

Let’s try Essential Waitrose mixed salad: green Batavia, Apollo lettuce, red oak leaf and Lollo Rossa. Red oak leaf and Lollo Rossa are old friends and I’ll be glad to give them house room again. Batavia turns out to be another frilly-leaf lettuce type; and I think Apollo is only grown for commercial use as I can’t find it offered to gardeners. It’s a Romaine lettuce – a type I like anyway, so I’ll just have to find a substitute.

So far… so everyday though. I’m not really looking to grow a wide range of lettuces. I’m after something a bit more interesting. I’m after some herbs in my salads. And maybe some peppery zing.

Waitrose baby leaf herb salad mix: very vague about the lettuce content, but adds baby spinach, rocket, flat-leaf parsley and chives (interestingly, the mix states the proportions of salad leaves to herbs: it’s 78% salad leaves to 22% herbs. So a handful of herbs to every four of lettuce-type leaves then).

Other interesting bits from the Waitrose range include their Tenderleaf Salad: lamb’s lettuce, pea tops and chard.

I had a hunt through other ranges, most of which we’ve tried at some point: Sainsbury’sHerb Salad is Lollo Rossa, Cos lettuce, rocket, coriander and parsley (again with that 80/20 ratio of lettuce to herbs).

Then there’s Steve’s Leaves: relatively new in town but with a good and improving environmental policy. Pea Shoots and Baby Leaves is a 40/60 mix of pea shoots, and baby spinach and chard. Other mixes in the range include wasabi (now that should be interesting), and watercress.

But you know what? I think we can do better than all that.

I want to try some heritage lettuces, with their quirky flavours and splashed or ruched leaves. I want to throw in some oriental leaves: mizuna, peppery red mustard, maybe chrysanthemum greens. And oddities like samphire and New Zealand spinach.

I shall report back via these pages. Should be an interesting year!

Inspiration from West Dean #1

13 Tuesday Oct 2009

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I’m suffering from a bad case of coldframe envy.

I went down to West Dean Gardens a little while ago, and for a kitchen garden fanatic like me it was like being given the keys to the sweetshop. Jim Buckland and Sarah Wain, who manage the garden and have overseen its restoration, must surely get some sort of award for dedication beyond the call of duty. Since 1991 they’ve turned the walled kitchen garden into a wonderful fusion of old-fashioned Victoriana and modern foody organic growing where they experiment with new (and old) cultivars using very 21st century techniques.

There’s also a college which among other things runs lots of mouthwatering courses in things to do with horticulture, and the gardens host a series of legendary foody events celebrating things like chillies, tomatoes and apples. You’ll see why it’s my kind of place.

But back to those coldframes.

Brick bases to absorb lots of heat and pristine white wooden frames. These babies must be 8ft from front to back.

They stretch right along one length of greenhouse (and that’s a very, very big greenhouse). And they’re packed with mixed salads of every kind, all sown lovingly in densely-packed rows. I wish, wish, wish I could grow salad like this.

The whole thing was a lesson in how to contrast leaf shapes, colours and textures: even humble old lettuce gets to look a million dollars if you mix it with a sprinkling of purple basil and pinch of perilla.

My discovery of the day was this dwarf basil, Ocimum minimum, which grows like a tight little football packed with leaves. Picked over just like thyme, they’re intensely fragrant: I always find ordinary basil a little tricky so this could be the answer.

The coldframe I really, really want, above all other, is this one. And the reason I want it is that bit of iron at the side: that’s an automatic Victorian light-lifting contraption. You can wind up the lights bit by bit to harden things off or adjust for the weather: no more bits of wood propping up the glass and getting knocked out, to the accompanying sound of breaking glass, by over-enthusiastic dogs bounding about the garden.

As if that wasn’t enough, they’ve got those lovely curvy glass panels too, designed to guide the water away from the wooden frame and down the centre of the glass. Sometimes those Victorians had the right idea.

I want, I want, I want….