Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
become a more important part of your diet. Most of the work lies in the picking
of them, and it's such a pleasure to gather your day's salad each morning that it
doesn't seem like a chore at all. This section gives a sample of the many 'salad
herbs' (plants for eating raw) that you might choose to add variety to your diet,
alongside more staple salad ingredients such as lettuce, radish, cucumber and
rocket.
Salad growing takes very little space, and there is no need to have a distinct area
for leaves in your tunnel. In fact, except during the colder months when there is
little pest activity, doing so is just asking for trouble. Don't make things easy on
slugs and other leaf-munchers: rather than setting out a nice dense bed of greenery
where they can live their whole lives undisturbed, put a few salad plants here
and there with space around them, and deal promptly with any trouble.
Hardy wild rocket may be ideal for winter, but in summer it tends to bitterness.
Basil is plump and aromatic in the summer, but even with pampering the flavour
quickly deteriorates as autumn begins. The head gardeners of Victorian estates
loved to show off by growing exotics preposterously out of season, but history is
strangely silent about how their produce actually tasted. For the best flavour,
growth and pest resistance, work with the polytunnel seasons rather than strug-
gling against them.
All salad leaves can be sown direct or into sheets of modules. The latter require
more work but can be brought indoors or given gentle heat with a pad or propa-
gator to allow an earlier start. Kept on staging or on a suspended shelf, they can
also be kept safe from slugs and other predators until the young plants are ready
to grow strongly, which makes it easier to end up with just the right number of
plants, at just the right spacing.
Watering tiny seedlings from above increases the risk of a sudden fungal attack
known as 'damping off', and using a capillary bed for trays of modules is unreliable
as there are always a few that are not in good contact with the matting. For best
results, check modules each morning and evening, and as soon as the surface of
the compost is just dry, stand the whole sheet in a large tray holding 2-3cm of
water. Once the surface of the compost is moist, lift the sheet out again to avoid
drowning the roots.
Most of the small selection of plants below work best with an eventual spacing
of 20-25cm, and the best quality and highest yields are obtained by successive
picking, as described for lettuce (see page 110). For more options for growing
salad, see Salad Leaves for All Seasons in the Resources section.
 
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