Welcome to the Organic Growers Alliance, and to the first issue of The Organic Grower – its magazine.
A chance discovery of salad bags as a way of selling vegetables saved my existence as a grower because by 2003 I was making so little money from other vegetables, sold in boxes off less than one acre, that I was wondering what else to do with my summers.
Since returning from France in 1998 I had been growing only part-time, earning more money from other work but always loving the soil and plants. I had even trained as a kinesiologist as I looked for more remunerative careers - in case you are wondering it is not much better paid than vegetable growing!
However, I soon found that leaves in a bag have many interesting and reasonably profitable possibilities. I can indulge my creative whims by growing all sorts of wonderful and interesting plants, suitable for different seasons and therefore healthy and tasty, AND I can ask a premium for the customer’s pleasure of having a ready-mixed, healthy, fresh, un-chlorinated and excitingly different blend of flavours which vary all the time. And there is no buyer complaining about leaf sizes, combinations, or supposed irregularities.
Instead, there is the Customer. Customer is king and yours will pretty soon give you feedback through buying more or less. I have had some ups and downs, mostly ups thank goodness, resulting in my offering to you a selection of golden principles which it pays to respect.
Firstly, seek the local market above all, through greengrocers, delicatessens, butchers, pubs, cafes, restaurants and your own or neighbours’ box schemes. This ensures both freshness and direct contact - I recommend putting your name on the bag so that you can build a following of loyal customers. Also put a little notice up at the point of sale with a brief explanation of your methods and a list of what leaves are in the bag at different times of year. People then feel more loyal and trusting towards you.
Suitable leaves to grow vary every month and sticking to those in season ensures healthier growth and better quality. I am often surprised to see so much mizuna grown in late spring and summer when lettuce is really the only leaf in season, at that time, and needs using to its full potential. The range of lettuce varieties now available is quite phenomenal and offers a broad palette of leaf shape, size, texture and colour. Remember that colour, part of the visual appeal of your bag, is vitally important and a few leaves of Bijou, Redina, Rosemoor or whatever (not Lollo Rossa, which looks nice but yields poorly), will make a great difference.
I grow all lettuce as ‘leaf’ rather than heart, plant at 250mm and pick off outer leaves as they develop, always leaving a rosette of four or five small leaves, which rapidly grow into another harvest. I find that lettuce puts on about a leaf a day in mid-summer, and is the most profitable crop to grow. Three sowings can take you through the whole season with the first outdoor pickings in late April, from a January sowing in the greenhouse, planted under fleece in March. My second sowing is at the end of May for cropping July/August and a smaller third sowing in late July will ensure some pickings, of diminishing quality, in September and October. Main lettuce season is May to July and this wants to be made the most of.
Flavour is, of course, a little lacking compared to oriental leaves and in fact almost everything else. This can be sorted by growing some rich-tasting herbs to complement the lettuce, such as dill, coriander, parsley and basil. I aim for just a few herb leaves in each bag, enough to offer an appealing waft of fragrant promise and excitement when the bag is opened. Greek basil from the polytunnel is my favourite for its regular offering of small leaves, harvested around the plants’ edges with a sharp knife, and it runs to seed much less than other basils. Red basils are excellent for their richness of colour and lemon or lime basil for an intense aroma of, amazingly, lemons and limes. Garnet red amaranth and orache can also be grown for colour but their flavour is almost off the scale, in the direction of none at all.
A most interesting and vigorous taste is sorrel, as long as the bright green dock beetle is not lurking in fields nearby. Large leaved french sorrel needs picking regularly to have small leaves but buckler and blood-veined sorrels are less vigorous and have unusual flavour and visual appeal respectively.
By August there are many other plants coming into season and flavours become stronger and more exciting. I sow rocket from late July and mibuna, pak choi, mizuna, and leaf radish, among others, from early August. Sometimes I sow thick and sometimes I sow thin, the latter method offers longer cropping of somewhat larger leaves which I sometimes pick individually rather than cutting.
September sees endives in full season and I like the scarole types especially, such as Bubikopf. Their broad leaves are less inclined to rot, in final stages of growth, than the ‘Frisee’ types. All endives self-blanch to some extent and make voluminous hearts of mild-flavoured leaves: I discard most of the large and darker green outer leaves. For summer endives I grow a small amount of Frenzy, a frizzy type, which responds well to regular cutting from a sowing in late May or early June. Early radicchios for leaves, such as Treviso Svelta, can be treated similarly but have bitter flavour and should be included in small quantities.
Late summer and autumn sowing of all the many salad members of the Brassicaceae will see them give of their best, with least flea beetle. They may even grow slowly through a mild winter but this cannot be relied upon and tunnel growing is the most consistent source of leaves from January to April. For example, some chervil in my tunnels this past winter has cropped heavily and with superb quality, while the outdoor chervil has yielded hardly any leaves of the right standard.
Much of November and December can be supplied with outdoor leaves from, among other plants, hearts of radicchio, Chinese cabbage, sugarloaf chicory and endives. Exact sowing dates of these species and the most suitable varieties to use would fill another article: suffice to say that the best sowing period in southern England is early July. Remember that a few days difference in sowing, as days shorten, will make a much longer difference in time of maturity.
Harvesting, washing and bagging leaves takes much longer than growing them. Picking can become quite a chore but, unlike other veggies, is reasonably well paid. In summer I aim to pick most leaves between 5 and 8am so that they are cool and crisp, with best potential for keeping well and looking good. I receive many compliments on this, such as from a judging panel for Taste of the West, who initially forgot to taste my bag on a hot day in July and left it overnight in a stuffy room. When they found it the next morning they expected it to be all mush and were amazed to find leaves intact and tasting good. I was awarded silver in the ready meals category, it ‘would have been gold had I used re-sealable packs’. Instead of which I run ordinary polythene bags through a plastic tying device, much quicker and cheaper than bags with sealing rims.
Leaves are gently mixed together and washed in a 40 gallon plastic drum filled with clean water (later used to water the tunnel). I spin out excess moisture through the bottom of my Alibert crates, now over twenty years old and as good as new. Then I fill bags of mainly 125g and some 250g for shops, plus 500g for pubs and restaurants. From April to November I sell about 40-50kg weekly, all within five miles, and less in winter depending on the weather. By spring my customers are desperate for good leaves again and pounce on the first offerings with no little glee.
My outlets say I have a good reputation and this is an important selling point. It stems from three things:
Charles Dowding
More details can be found in “Organic Gardening, a practical, no-dig approach” pub. 2007 by Green Books, £10.95 from www.greenbooks.co.uk