I think winter salads need a little heat to them; a few leaves that pepper the cooler greens and don’t mind being rested on by hot things, be that roasted vegetables or grilled cheese. For this you need the spicy salads from the brassica family, such as rocket, mizuna, and the many mustard leaves.
Rocket, as its name suggests, is up before the rest and races to grow, giving you substantial salads by autumn, slowly increasing in spiciness as the weather darkens. If its peppery heat is too much, try Real Seed’s ‘Mild’ rocket, which is sweet rather than fiery. By winter, cultivated rocket will have stopped growing unless it’s in a polytunnel or greenhouse. Not so for wild rocket, Diplotaxis tenuifolia, which is smaller-leaved, spicier and hardier. I love it on top of pizza.
Many mustards are delicious when young but almost unpalatably hot once mature, unless they are cooked. The chemical that makes them hot when raw turns bitter if overcooked, so these are really only to be flash-fried or barely wilted rather than boiled. Add them to the last 30 seconds of cooking and truly not much more.
The easiest to start with is a hybrid between kale and mustard, the former tempering the latter and giving it an extra bit of hardiness. ‘Red’, ‘Green’ and ‘Golden Frills’ are pretty plants with a fine filigree of leaves that work well in salads, though the more mature leaves can be cooked. In spring let them flower and self-seed for an effortless supply of new leaves in autumn.
I find the larger-leaved mustards, such as ‘Green In The Snow’ and ‘Red Giant’, a little too tough and hot for salads, though they’re excellent for cooking. Real Seeds offers the wonderfully named ‘Dragon’s Tongue’, which is deliciously mild when young.
Finally, there’s the mild-flavoured oriental salad leaves: mizuna, mipoona and mibuna. These give excellent returns quickly, even from tiny spaces. Mizuna has deeply cut leaves and is tolerant of both hot and cold weather. Mibuna has a flavour similar to mizuna, but narrow leaves that can be harvested in bunches. It must be sown in cool weather, so is most suited to autumn-growing. Mipoona is a new cross between tatsoi (a spoon-shaped Asian green) and mizuna – the result is a big-leafed mizuna that grows incredibly rapidly.
Sow all these seeds shallowly, either direct or into seed trays to pick out and pot on. All rocket grows successfully in pots and containers, as long as it is not overcrowded. Thin plants to 15cm apart in either direction, 25cm for larger mustards .
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