Call me a big, silly, girly girl, but I adore salad leaves. I grow tons of them in my garden, and eat shovelfuls of the stuff for lunch and supper. In fact, if you’ve only got a tiny amount of room for growing, I’d recommend salad leaves above anything else as just a couple of pots or a few lines of closely-sown leaves will save you a small fortune over those horrible, unsustainable bags of salad which supermarkets try to flog you.
Here are some of my favourite salad leaves.
The first is mustard (pictured above). I love a good fiery punch, and these leaves certainly throw that out. You’ll only need to sow a small line to get a good kick in your salads.
For a leaf which acts as a soft, sweet base to other, more powerful flavours, you can’t get much better than the beautiful ‘Red Salad Bowl’ lettuce. This is an oakleaf lettuce which never hearts up, and I enjoy picking the largest leaves individually from the base of the plant.
Even if you’re very economical when you sow your beetroot, you’ll always need to thin the plants, as the chunky corky seeds are in fact a large cluster of separate seeds. This is no bad thing though, as young beetroot leaves are juicy and tasty and their shocking red stems brighten up salads no end.
Although rocket continues to grow very happily in the middle of summer, throwing out beautiful flowers, it’s better picked now and later in the year, as the leaves can be unbearably peppery in hot weather. But still, I love these long, fabulous, spicy leaves.
This year I have grown more pea shoots than ever before, thanks to the fabulous Alys Fowler, who suggested growing them from cheap dried peas. I have two old drawers full of the peas at the back of my garden, and every day, I pick an enormous bowlful of them. They have such lovely soft leaves which taste even more of peas than the peas themselves.
And of course there are my cos lettuces, which are hearting up beautifully at the moment. These are ‘Lobjoits’ and ‘Marshall’s Red’, which are enormous.
But my favourite salad leaf, the salad leaf that beats all others, is the humble perpetual spinach, which I adore. There are so many reasons that I love this salad. The first is that it really does live up to its name. This is a member of the beet family, which means that it doesn’t flower until its second year. This is incredibly useful during the hotter summer months when true spinach and other soft salad leaves such as lettuce start to bolt.
I sowed a line of perpetual spinach last April, and the plants are still pushing out huge juicy leaves, which have kept me in salads all year long. The flowerheads are only just beginning to show, and so this line of salad has served me for more than a year. And with such lovely soft leaves, this plant scoops the award for the top salad.
What are your favourite salads?
