Winter salad growing

Jane Perrone has written about winter salads and her experience growing them. Hmmm. I love salad, but for me it has to have some constituents that just can’t be grown in a British winter: either tomatoes or beetroot, and peppers.

But Jane’s post got me thinking again. We have rocket growing in both greenhouses – it’s slow, very slow, but it’s growing. I use it mainly as a sandwich filling for packed lunches. Then we’ve got delicious new potatoes, grown in containers in the same greenhouses, and the Cylindra beetroot that I froze this year are utterly glorious when grated frozen and mixed into a robust winter coleslaw (red cabbage, beetroot, winter carrot and a few frozen redcurrants in a sesame oil and red wine vinegar dressing) so perhaps I need to up my game?

I have walking onions which grow all year round, and tiny leaves of kale which are crunchy and finally, wonderfully, whitefly free. I don’t like nettles or Good King Henry, and it looks like my French Tarragon may have succumbed to rot (my fault, I stood it in the same tray as some overwintering sweet peas and they need more water than it does, so it may have rotted at the root as a result of me meeting their thirst) but the greenhouse parsley and thyme are available, and small amounts of radicchio, finely chopped are deliciously zingy (too much is painfully bitter) so we do have the nucleus of a salad, without doing any more than we already are.

I’m going to talk to OH about this, and see if we can’t get better use out of the greenhouses next winter. One is already being geared up for peas and seed onions, but the other could easily be used to grow winter salad crops … thinking hat firmly on!

Labels: cylindra beetroot, Jane Perrone, rocket, walking onions, whitefly, winter salad