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New Year Resolution: Salad time

Why not make a vow to eat a homegrown salad at least once a week in 2014?

Hunting for a wholesome New Year’s Resolution? Why not do a Salad Challenge, and aim to eat at least one helping of homegrown salad every week for a year. We’ve done this before, and it was great fun. Here are some tips, recipes and highlights.

Microgreens

Even the most rubbish gardener in the world can grow microleaves. And if you want something that makes you look as though you are endowed with far more gardening ability and expertise than in reality, microleaves are wonderfully deceptive. All you need is a seed tray, some seed compost, and a couple of packets of mustard, basil, rocket, fennel, coriander and beetroot.

Sprinkle the seeds liberally and far thicker than you would if you were growing full-blown salads, and water. Within a week, you’ll have your crop: thickly grown and so flavoursome. The whole point of microgreens is that they pack all the flavour of the leaf into a tiny seedling, and as such they make a perfect and very stylish garnish. This is primary school stuff – remember mustard and cress? – but ever more stylish and cool. Here’s an even longer list of salads for microgreens.

Big leaves

The trick with most salads is to grow them out of the full sun but not so much in the shade that they never get going. Which can be a bit tricky. But at least try growing them at the foot of other plants, which will shade them a little. And then you need to water well to stop the poor things bolting. And when it comes to harvesting, adopt the pick-and-pick again technique, rather than cutting them all down: it means you get many, many bites at the cherry, if you fancy mixing your metaphors.

Here’s our Good Growing Guide for salads.

Foraged leaves

Top tips here: only forage where you can guarantee animals or humans aren’t poisoning the leaves either by defecating or with pesticides and herbicides. So your own garden is safest (if you don’t do either of the above, that is).

Edible flowers

Salad dressings

Recipes

Salad gardens

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