Content
- To grow winter salad: Harvest fresh garden salads also in winter
- Vegetables thrive in the winter, too
- Especially popular with gourmets, the pickles
If you sow and plant at the right time, you can also harvest salad in winter
To grow winter salad: Harvest fresh garden salads also in winter
A word in advance, which sheds light on motivation, why we, as allotment gardeners, should strive in the winter to cultivate the widest possible range of fresh garden salads.
These were not headlines from the newspaper with the big "B" at the beginning, but the headlines of contributions from the magazine "test" in recent years. In the March 2019 article it was possible to read: "Spring is here, but corn salad and arugula are currently growing under glass or foil. In their leaves we have found much nitrate. In the test: 28 non-ready salads, including six organic products - ten chicory, nine lamb's lettuce and nine arugula. As far as pollution is concerned, two salads are very good, nine just enough. We did not find harmful residues of pesticides or chlorates. Pleasantly low in pollutants: chicory. "(Quote online portal Stiftung Warentest)
Vegetables thrive in the winter, too
It grows almost by itself and without any elaborate equipment, either in the garden or even in the pot, so we do not need to abstain even in heavy frost on broccoli, coriander, kale or the particularly popular Asian salads. But which species belong to the variety of winter vegetables in our geographical latitudes? For that we looked around a bit at our Austrian neighbors. Wolfgang Palme from the higher federal teaching and research institute in Vienna has given some suggestions on variety diversity in his latest book "Harvesting fresh vegetables in winter":
Source: "Harvest fresh vegetables in winter" by Wolfgang Palme, published by Löwenzahn Verlag Innsbruck
Especially popular with gourmets, the pickles
We have already reported on this popular leafy vegetable with its different flavors and cultivated forms in another article. But what about the cultivation of these salads, which are externally characterized so that they have no head, but green, red or yellow and grown in leaf shape on our beds? Similar to the popular head and Romanasalaten is common, they can be planted here in Germany by the end of October without hesitation in the field, so that before the stronger degrees of frost can still form strong roots. To promote growth, as with the other winter salads, they should be covered with a foil, which is not primarily used as frost protection, but to keep wind and rain away from the sensitive plantlets.
Other varieties that are excellently suited for winter cultivation and grow into excellent vitamin suppliers well into the new year are asparagus salad, romaine lettuce, lettuce (down to -10 ° C) and the extremely fast-growing multi-leaved salads.