Search - Articles

platter of sandwiches. We both agreed that we felt a craving for greenery at this time of year.It might be too cold to grow your own salad leaves in the garden right now, but I'm tucking into lettuce, baby spinach, rocket leaves and a whole lot more

. The photograph featured here was taken last summer during my visit to the Mr Fothergill’s trial ground, and show mizuna, pak choi and other salad leaves.Salad leaves are some of the easiest crops to grow from seed in pots: just fill a pot with compost, sprinkle

There's a lot more to a great salad than lettuce. Apart from a nice assortment of colourful leaves and a slight crunch if they're fresh, I'm not convinced that lettuce adds much more to salad than bulk!I prefer to grow salad leaves with real flavour

petals to be sprinkled over a dish of salad leaves. No, I don't think they provide any additional flavour or nutrition, but they look great.I've eaten day lily flowers before. Eat hemerocallis flowers when in tight bud and they have a satisfying crunch

the better, as far as I'm concerned.I've still not found time to sow any salad leaves this year. Luckily, there's plenty of self-sown wild leaves in the garden. The hairy bittercress I introduced last summer has made itself at home, politely growing

and patios into productive plots to feed their family.So, what have I been picking? Salad leaves are an almost daily essential for me, and these have been augmented with chives, parsley, and self-sown rocket and watercress. To maintain continuity I need

as the plants start to flower.The spinach I'm growing in troughs as a salad crop, as you need to grow buckets of it for cooking and I don't have the space. Spinach is also prone to leaf miner fly, which bores holes into the leaves and lays eggs, so picking

rightly - and while not unpleasant, they were certainly an acquired taste.Dandelions grow bigger, with longer leaves, in wild areas than they do in lawns, where mowing keeps them flat and close to soil level. Apparently, the French often eat them as a

, but my thoughts are turning to the Mediterranean, and summer holidays. I like to imagine what I'll be growing and eating in the summer: masses of zingy tomatoes, sweet and crisp peppers, juicy cucumbers and buttery salad leaves. Oh, and warm ratatouille

.I love the way home-grown salads start off as a meagre collection of leaves in spring, then steadily grow as tomatoes, broad beans and other ingredients are ready to harvest. The watercress growing in my pond is always the first leaf crop I pick, followed