January salads: fennel, sorrel, onion leaves, daylily leaves and a snippet of parsley root
When I took up the challenge set by Michelle at Veg Plotting to find salads to eat from my garden every week of this year, it took a little while for the penny to drop that she was starting the challenge at the beginning of the year. Logical, you might think, until it occurs to you that it is January.
This most difficult of months in the veg garden means my salad pickings have been – let’s face it – a bit thin. If you’re efficient you’ve got greenhouses and coldframes packed to the gunwhales with winter salad mixes you sowed in September last year, growing, perhaps more slowly, but enough for you to pick a goodly meal.
In an emergency, of course, you can always try sprouting seeds: microgreens, grown on a windowsill, make deliciously different salad ingredients (I tried this last year: radish sprouts and pea shoots were my firm favourites).
But for now, caught on the hop, I have to fall back on what I can find in my garden that’s already there.
Feathery, airy bronze fennel leaves are exquisite to eat right through the year
Normally salads are the ultimate in grow-your-own fast food: sown every couple of weeks, up within days, pickable (just) within a fortnight. They last all of a month or two, then they’re gone – eaten, bolted or just a bit too mature for enjoying raw.
Wouldn’t it be great, I started thinking, if you had plants which produced salads for a bit longer. Even better: over winter. And certainly into next year.
And the more I looked, the more I discovered that there are more perennial salad ingredients out there than you’d think. In fact, I’ve amazed myself: with literally no effort, I’ve been able to pick something for salads every week of this month.
If you widen the net to include things like corn salad (so plentiful and prolific you’re never without it even though it’s strictly speaking an annual) and young leaves picked from winter veg, you can add kale, beetroot tops and the very tiniest chard leaves, too. Colourful, as well as delicious!
Ten of the best Perennial Salads:
Sorrel: to be used in moderation, as they have a really powerful flavour. French sorrel is big, beefy and green; red-veined sorrel is altogether more refined, with burgundy veins. Both carry young leaves right through winter and taste sharply lemony and tangy.
Fennel: this deliciously aniseedy herb carries a frothy tuft of young growth right through winter: bronze fennel in particular looks gorgeous sprinkled sparingly in with larger leaves
Garlic: instead of pulling all your garlic in August, leave a few in at the end of the row to overwinter. Then at this time of year you can be snipping the slenderest shoots like chives to sprinkle on salads. This works well with overwintering onion shoots, too.
Salad burnet: evergreen Sanguisorba minor is generously productive and so low-growing you can tuck it in around other things; pick the smallest, youngest leaves as older ones are too tough. The flavour is fresh and subtle, a little like a nutty cucumber.
Garlic cress: hard to get hold of but worth tracking down, Peltaria alliacea is another evergreen herb with a spicy, garlicky, almost mustardy taste.
Mint: as we all know, mint grows like billy-o through most of the season and it’s all you can do to keep it in check. At this time of year, though, it dies down to a little basal foliage of tiny, tender leaves: sprinkled on salads, these are just delicious.
Wild rocket: stronger (even stronger?) than the related and more familiar salad rocket, this is a robust little herb that comes back year after year. It dies down in winter, but you’ll keep it going later (and start it growing earlier) by covering with a cloche.
Horseradish: another salad ingredient to use sparingly, and only the very youngest of leaves as they get poisonous as they mature. A peppery flavour, with quite a kick.
Scorzonera: This useful perennial vegetable produces long black roots that taste of artichokes, but you can also pick the leaves when young: a little bland in flavour, but pleasant with other spicier ingredients to pep them up (the flowers later in the year are edible, too).
Daylily leaves: every veg garden should have a daylily (Hemerocallis) or two: the flower buds are crunchy and sweet, like a cross between peas and lettuce. Most varieties keep some leaves through winter: pick them young and fresh but don’t overdo it, as they’re laxative.
I do like the idea of leaving a garlic bulb or two in to harvest shoots from – they would be lovely.
Thank you for this post, there is some really useful information here – I certainly never knew you could eat day lillies. I inherited them in my garden, and have kept them for a bit of colour and to attract polinators. I’ll have a go at eating them too now.
I also hadn’t thought about young horseradish leaves. I want to grow horseradish in a pot, becuase it is hard to find over here. It’s also great to know that you can eat more than the root.
Hello Liz – yes they’re great sprinkled onto salads like you would chives. Even the larger leaves can be finely shredded (I shred mine with scissors) into a really tasty garnish.
Enjoy your daylilies Mel – I promise you they’re really delicious! I have to say I use horseradish very very sparingly – it’s a strong taste for me – but the leaves are in my opinion a more pleasant flavour (less eyewatering) than the root. Like radish – when you sprout them from seed the baby microgreens have all the deliciousness of a radish with none of the rootiness.