Salad days

GYO healthy lunch

WE are all being more mindful of our food these days – not to mention our toilet roll.

But we don’t need to rely on supermarkets to serve up the salads.

If you are as adventurous in the kitchen as you are in the garden, you can grow flavour-packed herbs, edible flowers and earthy-tasting kale for salads with a twist.

If you have more traditional tastes, grow red and green Salad Bowl – the original “cut and come again” variety that will keep you in leaves for weeks.

Celtuce, a stem lettuce with a Chinese origin and celery-like taste, is becoming popular and can also be treated as a cut and come again.

For Continental-style salads, grow oak-leafed Flamenco, which has bronze, crimped-edged leaves and a bitter taste.

Try it with Lollo Rosso, which has sweeter, red frilly leaves.

Also grow the tangy leaves of rocket and land cress, which has a crunchy texture and watercress flavour.

Mustard leaves can add a kick to salads too, especially as leaves get hotter as they grow.

Favour

Juice these greens with celery to keep tummies happy and do your blood pressure a favour.

Crops usually grown for their roots, such as beetroot, radish, carrot and turnip, also have leaves that are tasty when harvested. Roots add texture and colour as well as flavour to salads.

For a change, try roasting them and you will find they are sweeter with an aromatic smokiness.

No salad would be complete without tomatoes – and as well as seed, you can buy young plants and grafted varieties that produce more fruit, to get a head start.

For the best choice, you can visit tomato-plants-direct.co.uk.

Try Tumbler tomato in a hanging basket – one plant will provide up to 2kg of fruit. Or go for Redskin Patio Pepper, which has sweet green fruits turning red as they mature.

The current trend is to eat vegetables from root to stem, so there is little waste.

If you are unsure over what to do with the bits you would normally throw away, simply turn them into soup or tasty gravy.

Tip