Growing Salad

Here's a photo of our back garden. Tania Kindersley in her blog today said that the twitterati, facebookers and bloggers all present a positive face to the world. And that's true of this picture – you should see the other beds, a cacophony of slug-infested disasters. But, hey, we have salad. And I've always believed that's where the value is in vegetable gardening.

Those bags of salad in supermarkets are packed with enough chemicals to lay waste to Vietnam, cost a spare bedroom tax and are about as tasty as my toenail clippings. Plant your own. This bed has little gem, buttercrunch delight, lollo rosso and enough icebergs to give Titanic a run for its money. Spinach and red onion also (and we've just harvested the garlic). Most grown from seed. But I also bought a tray of 12 seedlings from the greengrocers in Shifnal for £1 and they've all reached maturity. That pays for all the butternut squash, carrot and beetroot malfunctions of an average summer in Shropshire.

Of course our salads aren't perfect. They have a certain amount of rabbit spittle, a soupcon of snail sputum, the icebergs have wrapped a number of slug pellets around their hearts. There's a copious amount of pigeon shit on the little gem. 

Still, what do I care, salad's for girls, obviously...