FAB FOLIAGE
● Le uce, chard, and kale are the top leafy plants to bring colour to flower gardens – easy to grow, wonderful colours, tasty and nutritious. But there’s one obvious problem. You grow some a ractive curly red le uce and they look great with fiery calendulas but, when you cut them for the salad bowl, you’re left with an ugly gap. The answer is not to cut the whole plant in one go. Instead, pull a few leaves from the outside of each and leave them to develop more. Same with chard and with kale. Some le uce varieties will take this be er than others and just keep producing more loose red leaves, never making a heart. The crisp and curly ‘Lollo Rossa’ and the oak-leaved
‘Red Salad Bowl’ are ideal but I prefer the more modern disease-resistant versions of the same thing. So try ‘Nikolaj’, which matures very quickly, or ‘Bijou’.
● Chards are outstanding and can be sown now for the summer and autumn, in summer for autumn and winter, and sown in autumn for spring. They've colourful broad-leaf stems in white, red, gold or even purple. Red-stemmed ‘Charlo e’ and white-stemmed ‘White Silver’ are especially colourful. Plant them in front of blue-flowered hardy geraniums perhaps, or growing through white alyssum or dwarf antirrhinums. In containers, with regular watering and rich feeding, they’ll grow into impressive plants and your Tumbelina double petunias will fill in around them pre ily and add some scent, too.
● Kales can also be sown now for summer and autumn, and later for winter. Curly purple kales (‘Redbor’ is my favourite) are superb foliage plants and look especially good with blue flowers, including larkspur and cornflower. New on the scene are some multicoloured curly kales, including the vivid purple and green ‘Midnight Sun’ and the green and white ‘Emerald Ice’. Amazing!
● Now these are all mostly vegetables we sow outside in the open ground. But it’s easier to create a ractive groupings if you place individual pre-sown plants in the best spots. And that means sowing seed in plugs and planting the young plants individually – exactly where you want them.
● You don’t need a greenhouse or a windowsill, simply wash the plug trays that previous young plants came in, fill with fresh compost, sow the seed, water and keep them in a cosy and sheltered place until they’re large enough to plant in your containers or borders. Job done.