9x9cm pot (8cm depth)
Description
This vibrant selection offers plenty of choice for gardeners and foodies alike. With their rapid growth you can cut as needed. These easy-to-grow leaves offer a stunning variety of colours, shapes and textures. Great for adding flavour to salads or sandwiches!
- Easy to grow
- Regrow after cutting for regular supply of leaves
- Tasty leaves to add variety to your salads
- Can be grown in the ground or containers
These delicious plants provide a good supply of leaves for salads and sandwiches throughout the spring. As annuals, meaning they grow from seed and die the same year, they recover quickly after cutting so there is no need for multiple plantings - these little ones keep on growing so you can harvest again and again. We recommend choosing a few different varieties so you can look forward to an exciting mix of colours, shapes, and textures to liven up your Spring greens!
Wasabina – a green leaf with a touch of heat.
Land cress – small leaves with the peppery taste of watercress.
Lambs’ lettuce – small soft leaves with a mild sweet flavour.
Salad Rocket – addictive nutty hot taste.
Tree spinach – pretty pink and green leaves that look good in salads.
Kale – purple-leaved variety.
Mustard red frills – pretty red leaves which add flavour and colour to salads.
Chard –lives for a couple of years and with enough root room will grow big leaves for salads and Chinese dishes.
Orache – the deep red variety with oval leaves, very attractive.
Amaranth – not hardy as not available until frosts have finished, this red-leaved variety is used in many dishes and the seeds are also used.
Spinach – pick the young leaves for salads.
Pak choi – a purple variety, use young leaves for salads or let it grow into a full-size plant.
Mizuna – looks like rocket but has a slightly cabbagy flavour.
Lollo rossa lettuce – pretty frilly lettuce.
Plant care
On the whole these herbs are hardy and will be fine with light frosts, in fact early spring is the best time for them because as the weather becomes warmer and the days longer, they are triggered to produce flowers and eventually seed. Once flowering is underway, they won’t produce any more leaves.
They can be grown in the ground, but work well in containers, the thin wooden boxes used on fruit and veg market stalls lined with some plastic is ideal, make sure to make some drainage holes. Feed well with a liquid feed, they will need it to keep producing new leaves. All the varieties are fast growers and can be grown together, one or two of the coloured leaf varieties will make the whole container look attractive
Remember they are as delicious to slugs and snails as they are to humans. There are several different solutions for control, such as the biological control Nemaslug which acts in the soil for about six weeks once watered in (it doesn’t control snails), to copper tape which can be wrapped around the top of pots or copper rings to go around plants in the garden and of course option of removing them yourself night time with a torch is the best time to catch them – and relocating them to distant pastures.