Grow your own winter salad Save money by growing your own salad
Grow your own salad and save
You can buy a plastic bag of mixed salad all through the year, even in the depths of winter. But can you grow your own salad outside in winter and save money? Assuming you buy supermarket salad every week, a bag would set you back around £1.50 a week – a total of £39 over the weeks from November to April.
We grew our salad crops outdoors all winter
We wanted to find out which salads would succeed from a fairly late sowing and discovered that a single sowing in September could provide fresh salad grown outside, without the food miles or plastic.
With winters generally getting milder, it makes sense to fill empty spaces with edible plants. And with the usual pests – even slugs – less active at this time of year, you should get to eat most of it yourself.
What we did
In order to find out which salads would grow outside and produce a decent crop all through winter and early spring, we chose a wide range of hardier salad crops and grew them on a site in East Anglia.
All were sown in modular trays in mid-September and planted outside in late October. Apart from an occasional weed and several applications of slug pellets, the only maintenance needed was to cover the whole plot with garden fleece to protect the plants from pigeons and frost.
Every month from November to May, we harvested some of each crop and assessed it for size, taste and appearance.
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