Salad days

What I’m doing here

This all started when I picked the first strawberries from my new allotment.

I'd never been so enraptured or so excited by food. It was a shock to find that anything could taste so good.

So what - I'd never had strawberries before?

No - all the strawberries I'd had were shop-bought, like as not flown in from intensive growers in Spain or Chile, and eaten in winter when strawberries should be a distant summer memory.

It revolutionised my thinking about the fresh food we eat every day. I started to wonder if you got the same amazing taste from all types of food grown and eaten in season. And then I decided to do something about it.

The Year of Eating Seasonally is my little experiment to find out what it's really like not to have it all. The only fruit and veg I and my family are going to eat in 2008 will be what's growing in the ground at the time (or, in winter, what I can get out of store).

I want to find out if the hungry gap is really as hungry as everyone says it is: whether you're really eating nothing but cabbage all winter; and whether you miss strawberries in December.

Along the way I hope I'll save a few tons of carbon being released into the atmosphere on my behalf, as I won't be requiring those French beans flown from Chile, thanks very much. And I hope I'll be rediscovering what food can really taste like.

If you have any comments, please feel free to post them anywhere you like - or you can email me at sallywhite@hotmail.com.

Salad days

Posted on May 5, 2008 by SallyGardener

Domestic goddess rating: 50% (haven’t exactly pushed the boat out today but since I’m GYO queen I’m happy) Five-a-day: 5/5 Food miles: none

On the menu: toast, marmalade and juice (breakfast); pasta and tinned tomato sauce (lunch); bacon, potatoes and salad from the garden (supper)

I’m so proud of my salad patch. I started it in February with the first sowing, in a module tray, of a salad mix from Seeds of Italy – fantastic company, the packet was crammed full of seeds and I’m still only halfway through them.

I germinated the seeds inside, then put them in the (frost-free) greenhouse as soon as they’d poked their noses above ground. Then I’ve been sowing a tray every two weeks ever since, and it’s worked a treat.

I have a little space about two or three feet by around six feet right outside my back door, which decided it didn’t want to be a herb garden – so I devoted it to salad leaves and haven’t looked back, especially this year. We’ve just started picking that first February sowing – the plants are around 15cm (6″) high and bursting with health. And the taste… you’ve never eaten salad till you’ve eaten it with seconds between picking and the plate. Crunchy, sweet, juicy… I’m afraid it’s spoiled me for supermarket salads forever.

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Filed under: Gardening, Grow your own, healthy eating, Seasonal eating Tagged: | salad, seeds