How I love a salad in the warmer months, and especially baby leaf salad! This year being the year of homegrowing, I really wanted to have 'cut-and-grow-again' baby salad leaves around the house as they are so handy to have and you can just snip your way to a lovely homegrown salad as and when you desire!
Back in April, we decided to sow "Leaf Salad - Stir Fry mix" seeds from Suttons. The mix included "Pak Choi, Kailan, Choy Sim Hon Tsai Tai, Tatsoi, Chinese Kale and Yukina Savoy".
The first seedlings came up after three weeks and ever since, we have been having lovely mild zesty crunchy salads from the young leaves.
Some were planted out in our vegetable patch and left to grow, grow, grow(!) so that we could harvest them a little later for our weekly Fusian style stir-fries. (See how these turned out here.)
Note: Pak Choi and Kailan are very commonly eaten chinese vegetables. Tatsoi seems to be one of those vegetables that is quite often referred to as being "Oriental" and found in salad bag mixes, but one that I've never ever eaten in Chinese cusine. But nonetheless, it makes a good addition to the family!
If you feel inspired to do some gardening and grow your own vegetables, then here is a list of where I bought my seeds from.
Sowing: I sowed mine in the months of April, May and then also in June. Packet says April through to October.
Growing: For the baby salad, I spaced them quite closely together and harvested often. For the larger leaves for stir-fries, I spaced them apart approx. 3 inches to give them enough space to grow
Growing: For the baby salad, I spaced them quite closely together and harvested often. For the larger leaves for stir-fries, I spaced them apart approx. 3 inches to give them enough space to grow
Harvest: As promised by the packet, baby leaves can be harvested in as little as 3 weeks
