Digging & Dreaming

Wild About Salad

A couple of weeks ago I was over in Lancaster for my Permaculture course. As part of the lunch that we share a fellow student bought in an amazing foraged salad made up entirely of leaves and flowers that she had found growing wild on the estate where she lives. The salad was delicious and inspired me to think about being a little more creative when I'm making salads at home. The one in the picture above is the first example of this newfound creativity.

I'm not quite as confident as Robin who created the salad I ate in Lancsater but taking inspiration from hers I decided to add common lettuce we are growing with more unusual leaves. On that basis this tasty little bowl contained mixed Italian Lettuce leaves, Radicchio, Sorrel, Nasturtium leaves and flowers and Calendula petals. Needless to say, the salad was absolutely delicious and went down a storm in my house! In fact, I'm already planning what I'd like to add to my next one. I particularly love the taste and look that flowers and petals add so any suggestions on other edible flowers would be much appreciated.

And The Award for Best Named Veg Goes To...

Last Christmas I was involved in a seed swap organised by Emma over at The Alternative Kitchen Garden. Basically this involved sending five different seeds to five different people, who all reciprocated by sending five different seeds back to you. This meant that when you opened your presents on Christmas day you ended up with twenty five different seeds. Good idea huh?

The great thing about this was that some of the seeds that I ended up with were really unusual and certainly not things I would necessarily have bought myself. One of these was the beautiful little plant you can see growing in the picture above - the wonderfully named Achocha Fat Baby. This is a vegetable that is originally from South America but is surprisingly suited to our variable summers here in the UK. It is supposed to taste like cucumbers when it is used raw in salads but when it is fried it takes on a flavour much more similar to green pepper. One of the main benefits of it is that is much easier to cultivate successfully in the UK than pepper plants and also generally more productive.

I started these off in the greenhouse about four weeks ago and now that the weather's warming up I'm planning to move them outside in the next couple of days. Especially after the warning that when grown inside they can be real bullies and take over everything! I'll let you know how they get on as the season progresses. And if you want to have a go of growing some yourself next year you can buy seeds from here.