Like the slightly foolish person I am, I signed up to the 52 week salad challenge launched on the Veg Plotting blog. I love salad. I really love it. And when I heard about the challenge, I realised that, yes, life would be a lot better, especially in miserable January, if I had plenty of salad to take along with me.

The idea behind the challenge is that everyone taking part eats at least one dish of salad that they have either grown or foraged each week of the year. I’ll be blogging each week about the salad I have eaten, along with tips for other people taking part in the challenge to pick up as well.

If you want to join the challenge, you can tweet about it using the hashtag #saladchat, blog about it each week and post a link on Veg Plotting, and submit your posts to be promoted on Garden Grab.

If you don’t have your own blog, you can blog about the salad challenge on the Fennel & Fern Your Blogs section. Click here to write a post.

Here are some initial ideas for salads ready to eat in the next week:

1. Microgreens

This is an excellent way of getting salad nice and early if you haven’t actually sown anything. These sprout in two days, and are ready to chomp on within a week. Find any container you can which has good drainage, place on a saucer on your windowsill, and sow seeds liberally on the soil. Water well, and your greens will be ready to eat within a week, with a wonderful intense flavour of their adult selves.

These are single-use crops: once you’ve harvested them, they won’t grow back, so sow every week to ensure a continuous supply. Good crops for growing as microgreens include: beetroot, chard, mustard, rocket, radish, fennel, coriander, cabbage, basil, parsley, mizuna, lettuce.

2. Overwintered salad leaves

If you planted out crops of autumn salad leaves and protected them, you should find you’re in good supply by now.

3. Foraged salad

Young dandelion leaves and the leaves of the hairy bittercress that grows everywhere whether it is welcome or not are perfect free salads.

Week 1

This week I’ve harvested baby chard and perpetual spinach from the balcony. I sowed these crops back in September as leaves which I could overwinter, alongside a couple of pots of chard which will get a head start on reaching maturity once the weather warms a little.

I have also sown mustard microgreens, which will be ready for my next salad challenge post next Saturday. I used an empty eggbox filled with potting compost for these, and placed it in a tupperware on the sunniest windowsill in my house. The good thing about microgreens is they don’t need oodles of sunlight to get them going, as they’ll never grow big enough to get all leggy and miserable like most plants grown on windowsills do.

And for a few weeks’ time, I’ve sown some mixed salad leaves and cos lettuce seeds to eat as baby leaves in my windowgrow, also on my windowsill.

Are you joining in the 52-week salad challenge? Or do you already grow salads all the year around? We’d love to hear from you.