Forget about buying the blimp-packs in the supermarket, growing your own salad leaves is easy - and they taste better too, writes Jane Powers
ONE OF MY favourite things that the garden gives me to eat is the very easiest to grow - salad leaves. They are so simple to cultivate that I feel almost as if I'm chancing my arm writing a whole column about them. In fact, all you need to know is in this next sentence. Sow a sparse row of seeds of any salad variety, in a drill two to five centimetres deep in moist soil, pull the soil back over the seeds, and walk away.
Chances are that the above method will give you a reasonable crop of green leaves, and if you do this every couple of weeks from now, you'll have salads until November, or even December. On the other hand - and I hate to be a wet blanket - chances are also that dry weather will cause the seedlings to bolt (mature too quickly and run to seed), or that the neighbour's cat will come in and see your neat seedbed as a thoughtfully prepared latrine, or that a couple of slugs will saunter up one night and help themselves to the succulent first leaves of your entire crop.
Those are some of the problems that can strike in an urban garden (and I speak from abundant and bitter experience). Rural patches have different sets of obstacles, including wind, too damp soil, and browsing deer or rabbits.
But the cheering thing about leafy salad crops is that most are very, very quick to sprout and grow: usually, you can count on picking infant leaves within 4 weeks of sowing. If disaster strikes one lot, there's plenty of time to get another started. And if one kind of leaf doesn't suit your soil, another most certainly will. If your soil is dry and light, forget about baby spinach (fashionable though it may be) and grow chard instead: the leaves are more earthy-tasting, less butter-textured, and they come in a rainbow of colours.
Rocket (Eruca sativa) is also prone to bolting in light soil, but wild rocket (Diplotaxis tenuifolia) is more drought-proof. The leaves of the latter are more peppery: they calm down some minutes after picking, but still remain a little hotter than those of their tame cousin. Wild rocket is a perennial, lasting from year to year. It self-seeds about the place too, so if you sow it once, you'll have it forever. Give the clumps a marine-corps haircut every couple of months to keep the fresh, young leaves popping out.
Dry soil also makes it difficult to grow thumping great heads of lettuce, but as all lettuce varieties can be harvested by continually picking off the outer leaves, this doesn't really matter. True, the dry-soil gardener never gets to savour the protected and pale inner leaves of a mature head of cos or radicchio, but if you let these plants heart up, the outer layers become as tough as old boots, and good for nothing except the compost heap (even our hens turn their noses up at them).
A serious pest in many Irish salad patches is the mollusc family: slugs and snails. Among the former, the huge black slug (Arion ater) is surely one of the most revolting creatures in the garden: a walrus of a slug, which despite the "black" in its moniker, may be any colour from orange to brown to khaki to black. In fact, it prefers rotting matter to fresh greens (which it eats, but sparingly). Far worse pests are the dainty garden slug (Arion hortensis), with small blackish body and orangey undercarriage, and the mucilaginous grey field slug (Deroceras reticulatum). This little blobby lad is often found nestling coyly in the inner folds of a lettuce leaf. Show it no mercy, for it likes nothing better than zipping through a row of new seedlings and shovelling them into its maw. (Like all slugs and snails, it is hermaphrodite - being both lad and ladette - so every individual is double trouble: capable of impregnating another of its species and of laying eggs).
Sowing seed of salad crops in modules and planting out the seedlings when they have a couple of sets of leaves makes them less vulnerable to attack. Water the planting hole before putting in the plantlet, pour a little more water around the root mass, and then pull the dry soil around it. Don't water again for some days. The secret cache of water under the soil keeps the plant growing, and it doesn't attract slugs and snails in the same way as a wet row of newly planted saladings.
Most leafy crops grow well with this method, providing you don't leave them in the modules so long that they become stunted. However, rocket and oriental greens do better if sown directly into the soil, as they tend to bolt quickly otherwise. The seedlings can be protected with barriers of wood ash (which must be renewed if it rains), or with wildlife-friendly slug pellets, based on ferrous phosphate.
When sowing straight into the soil, space the seeds as thinly as possible: and this doesn't mean pouring them from the packet, or dribbling them nimbly from your hand (no matter how they do it on the telly). Pour a tiny amount of seeds into your palm and use your thumb and forefingers to transfer them into the drill. Space them at least 2 to 3 centimetres apart. At this distance, you can harvest as cut-and-come-again salad leaves, by shearing off all the leaves when they are a few centimetres tall (they will grow back three or four times). Or, space them a little more distantly and pick a leaf or two from each plant as you need them. Or, thin the seedlings to whatever distance you like, and let the plants grow larger.
Leafy salads are versatile, and different methods suit different soils and different palates. Lettuce, for example, doesn't mind some light shade, and will actually welcome it in a hot summer. As long as there is adequate moisture, you can grow lettuce in odd places, such as under runner bean wigwams (until the beans hog all the light) or in between more slowly maturing plants such as leeks or brassicas. This is known as intercropping.
Or you can use leafy salads as ornamental and edible frills along vegetable beds: mizuna has sharp, lacy leaves; oak-leafed lettuces are satisfyingly shapely; and red-leaved lettuces are very jolly, while also being less attractive than the green kinds to slugs and snails.
If you don't have a garden, you can still grow salads: in pots, tubs and trays, or in any container with a few inches of depth and some drainage holes. And if lettuce is too bland for your taste, then any of the following (besides those mentioned earlier) can be eaten as baby leaves: beetroot, cabbage, chicory, claytonia (winter purslane), cress, American land cress, leafy herbs (including chervil, coriander, dill, fennel, parsley), kale, lamb's lettuce, orach, onion, summer purslane, radish, turnip and sorrel.
Any and all of the above, I promise you, are 10-times tastier than those inflated blimp-packs of leaves in the supermarket.