March: Salad

GROW YOUR OWN

Tip: Ignore all those Gardening gurus who tell you to fill pots then soak the pot or seed tray to dampen it, the best way to get (bought) compost thoroughly damp is to put it in a bucket, add water and stir vigorously with a small garden fork before putting it in your pot or tray.

If I grew only one vegetable it would be salad leaves, for value, taste and looks, and in any type of window box, pot or container! I don’t bother with lettuce that forms a heart except over winter, as you always end up with a glut, but I grow a wide variety of leaves and herbs, which can be picked either by cutting all the leaves, then letting them re-grow, or my preferred method of cutting the outside leaves as they grow large enough. This way each plant lasts for weeks. I start sowing lettuces in early March in my unheated greenhouse, using old guttering filled with moist compost, but you could equally use seed trays on a cool light window-sill. Sprinkle the lettuce seed very thinly down the guttering, and just press gently into the compost, no need to cover the seed – it will germinate within days. Don’t let the compost dry out, but don’t over water until the seedlings are well-developed, and you can harvest the first leaves from the guttering before you even think about planting the lettuce out. I tend to grow lettuce with darker (reddish) leaves, which the slugs seem to like less, but by growing it first in the guttering it is big enough to deter the slugs (mostly!). Try growing mottistone, mascara, red sails, cos rubens, red salad bowl, lollo rossa, bronze arrowhead, rocket (which has too strong a flavour for slugs) and chicory variegate del Castelfranco.

The lettuce seedlings will be ready to be planted out in about 4 weeks, either by scouring a dip in the soil and sliding the contents of the guttering in (then firming in), or by planting out individually into the ground or just about any type of container. In fact you could carry on picking the lettuce from the guttering, but it will not grow as large or last as long! I do 4 sowings a year, in March, May, July and September, which keeps the baby leaves coming all through the summer. The September sowing is ready to be planted out when just as I empty my growbags of the summer’s tomatoes – I then open out the growbags a little, add some fresh compost, soil from the vegetable garden, or a bit of church meadow mulch, and plant the lettuce into the growbags to overwinter in the polytunnel or greenhouse. In a normally warm winter I pick salad year round, but this year and last the plants have rather stopped growing during the really cold period. Any seedling left over in October gets planted out in the ground and they sit there doing nothing until about March, when they suddenly start growing again, and just before the first of the new season’s seedlings are ready for picking you have gorgeous fat heads of lettuce for fresh salads. In the winter I have found red sails, giant red mustard leaves and valdor particularly good even with the low temperatures of the past two winters, but there are lots of other hardy varieties to try. If you have the space sow corn salad/mache/lamb’s lettuce in October – it is fully hardy and you can pick it all through the winter, but you need to grow a fair bit to produce sufficient leaves to serve it on its own.

Note: the seeds I have mentioned are all available from www.sarahraven.com or www.simpsonsseeds.co.uk