Organic Gardening Magazine

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Small but perfectly formed

The wait for the new season’s salads is over, says Toby Buckland – start your own veg box scheme for a quick turnover of power-packed microgreens.

One of the best things I did last year was to start my own personal vegetable box scheme. Far from being the normal ‘dig up and deliver’ service offered by farmers, mine involved growing vegetables and salads in compost-filled fruit boxes on the greenhouse staging.

Compared to my usual expansive modus operandi of sowing and growing food crops on my allotment, my veg boxes are small-scale, but the crops they produce are just as welcome. This is a really easy way of producing exciting new ingredients.

The choice for the keen fruit-box veg-grower is between sowing cut-and-come-again leaves for salads and stir-fries or growing a succession of edible seedlings known as ‘microgreens’. Cut-and-come-again vegetables have been around for years; you sow vegetables or salads in closely spaced blocks and scissor off the tops when they’re large enough to eat. As long as the bottom inch of stem and a couple of buds are left intact, the crop regrows and will give two to four more cuts, depending on the type. I find this works really well in my greenhouse, particularly in the spring and autumn when outdoor leafy crops are vulnerable to slugs. I sow spicy salads including rocket, mizuna and mustards, plus turnips and radishes for their leafy tops – delicious when snipped up into stir-fries and omelettes.

Microgreens, on the other hand, are relatively new. If you haven’t heard of them, they started out as a foody fashion in the USA. They have recently been embraced by chefs in swanky restaurants in the UK. Unlike normal salad crops, which are chosen from an elite group of plants with succulent adult foliage, microgreens are grown like mustard and cress for their sparkling white stalks. These have an intense flavour and are packed with nutrients.

Most vegetables can make a microgreen. Particularly good are members of the cabbage clan such as kohlrabi and kale, and the spicy-leaved umbellifers like fennel and celery. The best thing about microgreens is the range of flavours they offer, not just between vegetable types but between varieties of the same plant. A red summer cabbage, for example, has a sugary taste, while a spring ‘Primo’ is much more herby. Another interesting thing I’ve discovered is that coarse vegetables like Russian kale, which have an almost inky flavour when mature, are soft and syrupy when grown as a microgreen.

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