A Taste of Winter Salad

Babbington's leeks ready to be picked

The garden is waterlogged, as it is every winter. I daren't go into it except to visit the compost heap or cut a few branches of winter honeysuckle or viburnum. I am worried about compacting the soil. All the lettuces, mustard plants, wild rocket, radishes and so on have bitten the dust but my perennial vegetables are beginning to come into their own. I started these off in 2020 and now find I can venture out in midwinter and pick enough to concoct the basis of a tasty lunchtime salad. 

                                                       

First of all there is the perennial cabbage, which I planted next to the shed. It is a straggly but  tallish plant and I have recently bent one of its stems and pinned it to the ground in the hopes it will take root and start a new plant.  This is good steamed lightly or cut up in tiny strips in a salad. 

Perennial cabbage - this one is called Daubenton kale   

Then there are the Babbington's leeks. They were planted as bulbils. They came up the first winter looking like small leeks. At this stage they can be cut to the ground and eaten - and will grow again from below. But I left them to settle in for a year. This year, sure enough, there they are and I have been eating them both cooked and raw.  They taste a bit sharp and little garlicky which I like. In the summer I let one of them go to seed on a long stem and when it deposited its bulbils on the ground I planted them all round the garden so I'm expecting many leeks to  pop up all over the place.     

                      

These are the tiny leek bulbils scattered on the ground.

                                              

                                                                                                                                                                      And here they are at the end of their stalk

The other perennials are a clump of wild garlic whose leaves perk up a salad no end and a red-veined sorrel which ditto and looks pretty too.                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Slightly moth-eaten red-veined sorrrel

                                                  

Wild garlic - useful if you haven't got any spring onions

                                                         

A perennial salad

I was given a pomegranate to take home after Christmas. I chopped it up and added some of the flesh to a salad made with all these perennial veg. with a little chopped onion, a few anchovies, and a French dressing.  It looked enchanting and tasted beatifully fresh.