How wonderful it is now that spring is on the way! The warmth and the hope in the air, the longer days, and – finally – full-grown salad leaves to eat. It’s the eighth week of the 52-week salad challenge and I’m starting to enjoy bigger, fuller salads.
Week 8
The warmer weather means the salad leaves really are growing, rather than creeping along sulkily. The garlic chives, which germinated late last week, were ready five days later to eat.
All allium seedlings crook their necks as they emerge from the seed, making the tray look like it is packed with green needle-eyes. Then they straighten up and begin to grow like billy-ho.
A word of warning: these are not micro-greens you can eat on their own. You can try, but they are so very strong that you only need a small bunch of them to perk up a salad or act as a feisty garnish to a dish. Their garlic taste is strongly magnified as seedlings, and even if you love garlic, any more will dominate your salad rather too much. Snip a few off with a pair of scissors and remove the seeds before sprinkling over a salad.
So it’s just as well that all my other salads are really sprinting ahead now. I finally have mixed lettuce leaves large enough to pick as cut and come again leaves, and the peas are in plentiful supply.
When I first harvested my peashoots a few weeks ago, I snipped of each stem just above a small bud. I did this because I knew that the growth hormones in the plant would travel down to the lower bud and encourage a new peashoot (have a look at this post for more information on plant hormones).
Here’s the second shoot, poking out of the stump left by the first. You can see that there is a third bud, ready and waiting for another harvest and for the movement of the growth hormones to make it the main growing shoot.
So I’ve snipped the pea shoot off above that third bud, and I’ll get a third harvest from this pea seedling, which is a great way of saving space and making the most of one seed.
And here it is: the first full salad of the year: full of soft peashoots, juicy beets, lush lettuces, spicy garlic chives and hot mustard. Roll on more of this.
This week I sowed
Coriander, peas
The salad challenge
VP at Veg Plotting, who started this wonderful 52-week salad challenge, has posted a round-up of the challenge in February here. It includes what she has learnt, along with links to many 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.
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Image a day
Belinda
as ever, your photos are amazing. I don’t think I quite have time to do a salad challenge: I always wonder how you manage it all! but i have got a lot of ideas from what you are posing each week, so please keep at it.
Lucy Wilson
I have to say that I prefer chives rather than garlic chives: the flavour is just too strong for me otherwise.
Mel
Conratulations on your firt full salad. Unfortunately I had to resow my cut and come again, because they all fell over one day, and didn’t get back up. They were being quite carefully watered, so I’m not sure what happened, but it’s still microgreens and sprouts for me for a little while longer.
I love the look of your salad, it spurs me on to better efforts, thank you
F&F
That sounds like you got damping off Mel: try changing your soil and trying again with a little less watering. Let me know how you get on!