Self seeded winter salads

 

Radicchio:  bigger than when I transplanted it!  Oct 2020

After a few months off, we're eating little side salads again.  Even I can see the incongruence:  summer is salad time, winter is cooked vegetable time, right?  Well, I just so happen to be lousy at growing actual lettuce and stuff.  I mean, the slugs and bugs almost always get them--I even lost some once to a rogue rabbit (how did it even get here?  We're a long paved maze of side streets away from the nearest field)!  I've mostly given up on traditional lettuce--though I do have a few small ones at the allotment from a free packet of seeds, still alive.  But very small and not likely to get much bigger now at the end of November.

However, this time of year I have some non-lettuce salad greens which have been successfully self seeding for me for a while;  the best of them are chard, miners lettuce and mizuna.  The celery I have is a cooking variety, though when blanched it makes for a tender and mild salad addition.  I'm not currently blanching any, though I really should do a few.  These are all self seeded plants too.

When there's a heavy frost these plants can't be picked for salad, but they tend to shrug it off once it thaws again.  My kind of food!

The radicchio pictured above is a new experiment for me, and though the plants are marginally bigger now than in the photo, I really don't know if they're going to be salad worthy this winter.   They were not self seeded:  I sowed them in trays and transplanted.  I do however, have self seeded Belgian endive growing in various places which I am attempting to blanch for later salads.  I cut down the tall flowering stems and put a bucket over the plants.  Hope the slugs aren't having a party under there.