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We ran out of salad and wanted some to go with our veggie lasagne last night, so I scavenged what I could off the plants, though pickings were considerably thinner than has been the case up to now. I managed sufficient for the four of us even so:

Allowing for the container that’s another 98g, so we’re now (just) over the kilo for our running total with 1034g. There’s pretty much nothing left that’s ready to pick now though. I can’t see us getting more than two more picks between now and Christmas.

Having done a bit of research it appears that coriander plants create new shoots from the leaf axils and can therefore be cut back to just above a leaf axil after which they’ll regrow from that new shoot.

This is exactly how some of my plants look. Others however appear to have no shoots growing from at least the first four or five leaf axils and somewhat predictably these are the taller ones that I’d like to cut back a bit as they’re getting rather tall and leggy, to the point where they’re struggling to carry their own weight.

So, as they’re liable to collapse anyhow, I’ve experimentally cut some of those back to a couple of leaves tall to see if that will promote some new growth now the original leader is gone and we’ll see what happens over the next few weeks.

In the process I’ve harvested another 25g of leaves which I’m going to credit to my winter salads experiment even though they’ll actually probably end up being frozen and eventually used in a curry recipe. That gives me a running total of 936g of salad leaves so far.

Only eight days since my last pick, but we needed salad for dinner this evening so I went out and took pretty much everything I thought I could.

The coriander is getting rather leggy. I don’t know if that’s just because the light levels are reducing or if I can clip it back closer to the compost and it will regrow from lower down. Only one way to find out I guess, so I might try that tomorrow.

The salad rocket and lollo rossa lettuce are lagging behind a little. I hardly picked any of them today. The other lettuces, leaf radish and red chard seem to be doing ok however, and I have no complaints about the mustards.

I ended up with 125g (90g for the container), giving me 911g over the four weeks I’ve been picking so far. We have given some to my in-laws, but that’s actually quite a bit of salad we’ve eaten in four weeks 🙂 Sadly it is the least I’ve had from a single picking, so I think it’s definitely time to leave longer between picks now.

I recalled whilst writing my last post that I intended to work out the costs for producing the winter salads. I’ve therefore been back through all my order confirmation emails and here they are:

The total seems quite high for (what I hope to be) one winter’s worth of salad leaves, but I think it’s fair to say that the costs aren’t really what they seem. The compost is clearly a one-off thing though in fact I used some that we had lying about and I could have used some we made last year, but the trays may well last for years. The lettuce seeds were all from packs that I happened to have left over from the summer and in fact I’ve probably barely used a tenth of the contents of any of the packs. I’ve put the newspaper down as free since I just raided my in-laws recycling, but if I didn’t have that then I might well just have used bits of cardboard packaging from online deliveries or something like that. Even scraps of old clothing would probably do the job. Whatever I used I don’t think I’d have paid anything for it.

For the sake of argument if I guesstimate that the trays will last five years and that I could keep unused seeds to sow next autumn and the following year as well and they’d remain viable then that would actually bring the annual cost down to about £18.60 which would leave us about one more pick from breaking even, based on the cost of buying pre-packaged organic salad leaves.

If I used our own compost and I knocked up some trays myself from scraps of timber we have lying about (which was my original plan, but I just ran out of time) then the annual cost would be just under £8.75 which should mean breaking even after one more pick even pricing based on the cost of pre-packaged non-organic leaves.

And of course there’s still the additional benefit of not having the plastic packaging waste, and perhaps also having a more healthy diet because we eat the salad we have rather than choosing something else less healthy.

My wife asked me to pick some salad today to go with our meal this evening. I was going to leave it a little longer as growth has quite obviously slowed down now and I suspect we’re not far off going two weeks between picks. Most of the plants are looking healthy though, at least. The obvious exception is the salad rocket which does seem to be struggling a little and not showing much growth at all.

In the end however we managed a pretty reasonable quantity of leaves totalling 146g (90g for the container again):

That gives us a total of 786g of salad so far.

The long shadows in the photo are thanks to the late afternoon sun, just above the horizon, shining in through the window on the other side of the kitchen.