Winter salad (pretending it’s Spring)

Being able to assemble fresh and interesting salads makes you really appreciate growing your own. We had a sunny midwinter day recently where we bucked the easy routine of bread (home made sourdough of course!) and cheese for lunch and had a freshly picked salad.

It's so good to make a salad straight from the garden, and Winter gives us plenty of choice
Fresh picked lettuce, highlighted with borage, nasturtium and pineapple sage flowers, and a mixed tomato salad.

Making a Winter salad

What lifts a salad out of the ordinary is having some visual variety to choose from. One type of almost-ripe supermarket tomato? Hmmm. Three types and colours of homegrown tomatoes? Yum! And for the lettuce salad, spicing it up visually and flavour-wise with blue borage, yellow nasturtium and red pineapple sage flowers takes it from ordinary to a treat.

Lettuce, the basis of most of our salads here, is so rewarding. In your home garden you can easily have four or more varieties growing, to give colour and shape variations. Then add whatever other greens are about, maybe dandelion, endive, chicory, cress, whatever; a few leaves will add extra flavour and colour.

I think the only rules for green salad making are plenty of olive oil, a good amount of salt, and a toss of something acid. Otherwise, the garden is your pallet.

It was a nice lift that gave us an early glimpse of Spring in midwinter.