Vegetable View from the Patch
Grow a rainbow in your back garden and soup up your salads with a dazzling array of colours
Advice from health professionals suggests that we would all do better if we “ate a rainbow”, meaning that we should pack our diets with many different colours of fruit and veg.
This is a lot easier to do if you grow your own because besides the usual shades of greens that you find in the supermarket, there are thousands of varieties that don’t conform to the standard shades.
Take peas for example, the useful variety Blauwschokker has purple pods that can be eaten while they are young, while the peas that emerge from them are the usual green.
Purple Majesty is a dramatic potato that, unlike other coloured varieties, retains its beetroot-like appearance when cooked. And then there is Black Russian, a dark and appealing tomato that looks very tasty when sliced in salads. From white carrots to green and yellow-striped courgettes, violet cauliflowers, beetroot which when sliced reveals concentric rings of pink and white, and chard that lives up to its name of Bright Lights because of its yellow and red stems. There’s even purple asparagus and beans in pink and red.
And that’s before we even get to lettuce, which can range in colour from fresh green to red.
All of these and more are easily available as seeds and you can also find young plants of some of them from specialist seed companies, and they are all worth growing, not just for their health benefits but for the way they brighten up the veg plot.
This year I’m growing several different varieties of brown tomatoes and many different colours of salad greens and I’m also going to try purple spring onions but if you are more ambitious you might want to try Amaranth Red Army which has edible leaves the colour of a poinsettia, and inflorescences that are bright pink. Better known as the flower garden staple, Love Lies Bleeding, its seeds are an important food source in South America. It’s one of those plants that performs on all levels, from border favourite to tasty salad and kitchen staple.
Much smaller, but just as useful, is the nasturtium, which has peppery leaves, edible flowers and seed pods that can be pickled in brine and used like capers.
I love nasturtiums and I don’t think any vegetable patch is complete without them and, as a bonus, they can be used as a sacrificial diversion for cabbage white butterflies, which can be tempted to lay their eggs on them, leaving the cabbages unscathed.