It’s official: the hardest month of the 52-week salad challenge is nearly over. January was always going to be tricky, especially as I only had a few salad plants overwintering on the balcony. But now the indoor salad garden is starting to become rather marvellously potent.

Week 4

This week it has been the turn of the peashoots, with their lovely, soft, intense foliage.

One of the problems with starting seed for outdoors on a windowsill at this time of year is that it puts on lots of lush, slightly leggy growth months before you can plant it out. That’s why I advise gardeners to really time their sowings appropriately.  But with salads like this, all that wisdom goes out of the window. These peashoots will never reach the stage where they need to support themselves, as I am about to harvest them. Lush, soft, leggy growth is much better than tough, robust stems if you’re serving a salad.

Here are the plants, growing in the windowgrow in my spare room. I’ve sown them from a packet of dried peas that I bought from the local supermarket, rather than wasting good shelling pea seed on a salad.

I harvested them today, and served them with more mustard leaves and chard in a salad with Parma ham and olives. Perfick. So perfick, in fact, that peashoots are one of my favourite salad leaves in the world.

This week I sowed

Mixed salad leaves, mustard, peas, basil and garlic chives.

The salad challenge

VP at Veg Plotting, who started this wonderful 52-week salad challenge, has posted a round-up of the challenge in January here. It includes what she has learnt, along with links to some of the blogs written by those taking part.

Don’t forget to follow others taking part in the salad challenge on twitter using the hashtag#saladchat. And if you don’t have your own blog but want to write a post about your own experience of the challenge, then use our Your Blogs section.