We needed a salad to go with dinner last night, but when I visited the greenhouse to pick over my winter salads there just wasn’t anything to take despite being almost two weeks (thirteen days, I think) since my last harvest. It’s not been very warm recently and almost permanently overcast so I’m assuming that’s why. I was forced to harvest some leaves from the “spare” plants in the polytunnel instead. I did however also take half a dozen radish from the polytunnel. I think that’s my third harvest of the radishes this winter, so I’ll definitely be doing more of them next time.
Having the polytunnel as a backup for salad leaves is great, but I am mindful of the fact that if we get a really hard frost, or perhaps just a string of days where the temperature doesn’t really get above freezing, that could kill off those lettuces and leave me with nothing but what’s in the greenhouse. I think therefore that to produce regular salads for the four of us (or even six if I include my in-laws) I really need to plant up more trays and perhaps only pick half the plants for each harvest, giving them more time for regrowth between harvests. As we should have an additional greenhouse for actually growing plants this year meaning my existing one can be given over entirely to propagation, I can probably add enough additional staging and/or shelving to make that possible. I will also be growing different lettuce varieties that should perhaps do better in cold weather.