More delicious food you can grow yourself

Adding some exotic salad leaves, like Lollo Rosso and peppery Rocket to some cold Alaskan salmon and tomatoes, red onion and beetroot makes a really tasty, fast and ultra-healthy lunch.

And you can grow your own salad leaves for most of the year and, provided you can provide some natural daylight during the dark winter months, you can do it all year round by a sunny wondow.

Fill your trough or large pot with compost, firm it lightly so it's level and add water. Then simply scatter the seeds very thinly on the surface of the damp compost and then sieve a fine layer of compost just sufficient to cover the seeds. By watering the compost first you avoid the danger of washing all the seeds to one corner, which could easily happen if you watered afterwards.

If you find it hard to sow the seed thinly enough try mixing the seed with a little fine sand. That way the proportion of seeds will be lower and they will be sewn more thinly.

In a few days, your little seedlings will be germinating...

Salad leaves a few days after sewing

And, within a few weeks, you will be picking your very own salad leaves, which will be a powerhouse of valuable vitamins and minerals - and far more beneficial than the ready picked leaves you'll find in the supermarket, becausae you'll be eating YOURS just seconds after they were picked, so you'll get the full benefit of all those valuable minerals and nutrients.

Picking the leaves, as you want them, just before your meal

That's because, as soon as the leaves are picked, they start to degrade and lose that vital goodness. But not so your lightening fast food salad leaves!

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