SPOTLIGHT ON...
WHEN you’re used to picking fresh, homegrown salads from the garden all summer, it feels like a bit of a letdown going back to shop-bought greenery in winter.
Well, the good news is you don’t have to. You can harvest a worthwhile crop of tasty baby salad leaves indoors from your windowsills.
You don’t need special equipment – a few pots, seed trays or a trough will do the trick. But to be successful, an indoor salad patch needs good light, including a few hours of direct sunlight every day.
Salad leaves aren’t fussy about temperature, though they grow faster at a steady room temperature.
I can’t overstate the importance of careful watering. Little, light and not too often are the golden rules.
For the sort of salad leaves that you use a lot of – rocket, bull’s blood beetroot leaves, lamb’s lettuce (corn salad) or baby spinach leaves – it’s worth sowing a whole trough or a half-sized seed tray with the same crop.
Fill your container with seed compost, strike the top off level and firm the mixture slightly. Then, scatter some seeds thinly all over the top, so they land roughly half an inch apart.
Cover with a thin layer of horticultural vermiculite. This keeps the seeds moist and holds them down, but when the seedlings come through they will be perfectly clean and not covered with soil.
Leaf crops only take six to eight weeks to reach cutting size. When the young plants are big enough to use, either pick off individual leaves or snip entire plants in much the same way as you would cut mustard and cress, leaving the original plants to grow.
You should get three or more “cuts” from each crop, and since you only take as much as you want each time, nothing goes to waste.