Gray - Grow it! Cook it! : The Beginners Guide to Producing your Own Food

A bowl of mixed salad is one of the healthiest, easiest and tastiest meals you can prepare for you and your family. Kids dont always appreciate green leafy vegetables, but chopped lettuce stirred into a bowl of colourful peppers and tomatoes always goes down a treat!

Growing salad ingredients couldnt be easier and many can be grown indoors, in a conservatory or even a window box, as well as outside in a traditional garden. If you have a conservatory or greenhouse, salad can be grown almost all year round although, as its eaten raw and often cold, other veggies can be eaten during the cooler months of the year. Eating seasonally is a good rule of thumb when balancing a healthy diet.

This chapter covers five main ingredients of a nutritious and delicious salad bowl:

• tomatoes
• lettuce
• cucumber
• peppers
• onions.

There are many other vegetables you can add as and when you have them available:

• carrots grated or finely sliced
• garlic crushed or finely chopped
• mange tout whole or cut in half
• fresh peas or beans cooked and then cooled
• herbs and edible flowers
• nuts and seeds.

Prepare your salad as close to meal time as possible. As soon as you start cutting vegetables, they begin to lose some of their vitamin content. However, picking your salad from the garden in the afternoon and eating it in the evening is a lot better than buying tired, old looking vegetables from the supermarket.

If your little darlings refuse to eat anything that doesnt come out of a packet, you could try tipping the tomatoes into a freezer bag on the quiet and then make a big deal about getting them out of the fridge later. Or even better, get them involved in the garden.

There is evidence that the Incan civilisation grew tomatoes as a food crop but over the centuries the tomato was grown as an ornamental plant because the fruits were thought to be poisonous.

By the early nineteenth century the tomato was once again considered a worthy food crop and businessmen ate tomatoes in public places to prove the fruit was in fact edible and could be safely consumed. The earliest recorded tomato ketchup recipe was developed in 1818.

Because tomato plants are self-pollinating, they tend not to change the components of their particular variety very much, which means we have many heirloom varieties available today, as well as many new hybrids in all sorts of shapes and colours.