Leaf of last week: Cornet de Bordeaux

Not only is this one of the biggest leaves on our site at the moment but wow, what a mouthful of a name! It’s the escarole type of endive and I just had to resurrect ‘Leaf of the Week’ to show it to you.

It has been a hugely successful crop over the past winter and has continued to grow nicely over the last few weeks of unsettled weather. If you get the salad bags you should have no difficulty recognising it! This type of endive is less bitter than the other types.

Last week was the first day back harvesting on the sites. Now that British Summer Time has arrived (even if summer itself seems far off!), we are back to harvesting on a Tuesday. This means super long days which end in trailer loads of salad bags being cycled from our growing sites to Growing Communities’ HQ, ready to be packed into the veggie boxes the following day.

Monthly dressings…

So, last year I brought you leaf of the week. This year, I bring you ‘Monthly Dressing’ to make those leaves taste super good. It’s an idea that Ru and I came up with down at the site earlier this year and we trialled it this week.

We each bought in a dressing that we thought would go well with the leaves that are growing at the moment. Though there are not as many leaves this time of year, we are still managing to get quite a few which make it into your veg bags, if you are lucky!

The leaves that do well in this kind of weather are pretty strong tasting, your mustard leaves, rocket, endive and a sneaky wild chicory that Ru’s been blanching ( = covering with dark cloth so that it loses its bitterness). We also threw in some rouge d’hiver lettuce for its looks.

Three volunteers were on hand to help with the taste test. We shredded the leaves to get a good even mix of flavours in each mouthful (maybe could have been finer) and then split them out into two bowls. Then we drizzled the dressings over the top.

Ru had gone for a sweeter dressing to balance the strong flavours of the leaves. He obviously knows his leaves better than I do, as my delicious basil and sunflower seed dressing just didn’t quite cut it. And even I joined the unanimous vote to make his the first dressing to be featured on these pages.

So, what went in his perfect dressing…

200ml Extra Virgin Olive Oil
100ml balsalmic vinegar
Pinch of sea salt
Ground pepper
And, the secret ingredient…1 tablespoon of maple syrup.

Maybe my dressing will do better in the summer months…look out for it!

Leaf of the Week: Lattughino

Well, here’s another winter lettuce for you, this one with a more unpronounceable name than any of the other leaves I have brought to you this growing season – it’s called Lattughino, and believe me I have had to ask Ru to tell me its name loads of time before it stuck. Here’s a rather sweet little one…we take about 2-3 leaves off one this size.

It, like last week’s Rouge d’Hiver, has a reddish tinge to its leaves. It’s proving to be really productive, which is great as we head into the cold months.

Leaf of the Week: Rouge d’Hiver

Now here’s a good looking leaf with its blushing sides. This is the lettuce that we used to replace all the cos with a while back. It’s growing OK but not brilliantly, just taking its time to establish.

Sometimes called winter lettuce it tolerates the cold well, hardly a surprising fact as the name translates to winter red. What might be more interesting is that the colder it is, the redder it gets, so if you want a colourful salad, it’s good to plant it as the cold descends!

Leaf of the Week: Kale

After my bits and bobs blog a couple of weeks ago I realised I had shot myself in the foot. Each one of those ‘random’ leaves was a potential subject for this feature and I had used them all up! Even with only 3 more weeks, including this one, left to go, I thought I might have done myself a disservice. But no! The range of leaves we grow for the salad bags at Growing Communities goes way beyond my expectation. Here, growing in perfect time to take the title of leaf of the week, is kale.

This has actually made a bit of a comeback because I recognise it from my first few weeks at Growing Communities back in April. It’s a member of the brassica family and has that wonderful soft gray look. Unsurprisingly it has the same texture as cabbage and taste but this kale, grown for salad, is not as tough as the one you might boil up to get your vitamins…

Leaf of the Week: Leaf Celery

Well, here’s a true leaf of the week, for like none of the others so far featured, it has leaf in it’s name.

This is a cut and come again version of the celery that you might be used to. But here, instead of eating the long crunchy stalks, we eat the leaves. It looks a bit like flat leaf parsley so you might be forgiven for mistaking it for the herb. Although we won’t forgive you, for its distinct celery taste should have given it away. Also, the leaves are just a bit tougher. I really like harvesting this leaf, you gather up all the pieces into a bunch and chop them off. At the risk of sounding a bit strange, it kind of feels like you are giving the plant a hair cut!

Leaf of the Week: Rainbow Chard

Now here’s a great salad leaf cum vegetable. If you eat them young, as pictured here, they add some lovely colour to your leaf selection - in particular, the stems which give them their name. Let them grow a bit more and you can pop them in the pot and cook them as you would spinach.

The rainbow effect is actually only achieved by planting white, red and yellow stems together, though of course this is a bit of a lottery when you grow from seed. Less unpredictable is the goodness that you’ll get from eating it - just like spinach, eat this chard and you’ll have a fantastic source of iron, magnesium and Vitamin C.

Bits and bobs on the wild side…

Every week the majority of leaves that go into the salad bags we pack are those that we grow in the main section of Allens Garden - the green oakleafs, the red oraches, cos, the lollo rossos etc. etc. All good leaves, sure, ones that you would find in any salad worth its salt. But it’s on the wild side that things get more interesting. In this section of Allens Garden we follow a more forest-garden approach. It’s not as managed as the other area and when you harvest you really feel like you are foraging. So, of course it means we spend a bit more time picking these leaves, lifting up other plants sometimes to get to them, but the taste that they bring to the salad makes it all worth while.

In a little bit of a departure from my usual blogging style, I thought I would share them all with you - something like a rogues gallery of ‘bits and bobs’, as Ru calls them, ‘the unsung heroes.’ Hope you enjoy!

First up is mint - one of the largest beds on the wild side, this plant has been producing since I arrived in April. Mint in salad is a must - makes it very fresh and surprising. You just pluck out the tender tips…

Next up is salad burnett. A delicate little string of leaves, with a very subtle taste and oh so pretty in your salad bowl…

Then come chives, featured last week as Leaf of the Week. Here they have already been cut back.


The next is a truly delicious leaf called saltbush. It is, as its name suggests, salty. It’s almost as if the leaves were finely dusted with salt.

Then there is buckle-leaf sorrel. This grows voraciously on our site, so needs constant cutting back, which is great for us and, if you like the sour taste, great for our salad eaters too. It’s good with a sweet dressing…

And here, looking nothing like the buckle-leaf variety above, is common sorrel. It does, however, share its taste…

This next one is marjoram, typically used in cooking, as a herb, but as you’ll know from my last couple of leaves, herbs get tossed into our salads too. We make sure we pick the young tender leaves.

And as grand finale, this is Ceylon spinach. I love it that this is spinach. It’s so succulent and it climbs! The leaves get pretty big, which is great because for a moment we thought they weren’t going to get a chance to grow at all - something, we think it might be fleas, rather liked the young plants. Now they are doing really well, climbing up and round the stakes we optimistically put in a few months back. Apparently they can get to 30 ft in their true habitat in Africa and southeast Asia. Now that would be something!

And in conclusion, here they all are together, picked and mixed up, ready to go into this week’s bags. All together they gave us just over a kilo of leaves. It might not seem so much out of a total of 10.8kgs. Yet, without these bits and bobs, the salad just wouldn’t be the same.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 1 | Dog: 1

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 10.8kg | 2 punnets blackberries: 600g | Tomatoes: 24kg!! - yes, I know, it’s amazing! We thought the tomatos would peak last week but here we have a whole 6kg more! Those calabash toms are incredible!

Leaf of the Week: Chives

Eek! We have another herby interloper this week! This feature is becoming seriously controversial! But this time, I think the controversy comes more in the question of shape. For chives, as you can see, really are more of a blade rather than a leaf. You call them  chives, with an s, because you never get just one chive…

But, whatever you think, whether chives should really be leaf of the week or not, these blades have played a pretty much constant role in the salad bags I’ve helped to grow over the last few months. Never too many but just enough to give their delicious onion-y flavour to the pack. Bruce, my fellow apprentice, doesn’t think a salad is a salad without them. Chives are the smallest member of the onion family. We grow them in clumps, because they like to grow that way, and also because it is so easy to cut them for the salad.  And they are not only good tasting but the growing plants also help to repel pests from other plants…so surely worthy of being featured here?

Leaf of the Week: Basil

Yes, yes, I know. Basil is a herb. But it’s still a leaf and it does go in our salad bags - at least the leftovers do. We normally pick as much as we can and bag it up in 30g packets, ready to be sold at the farm shop. “Where’s the farm shop?” I hear you shout. Calm down, it’s at the Old Fire Station in Stoke Newington, where people come to collect their weekly vegetable boxes. That’s where we sell all the extra bits and pieces that we grow around the sites. But I digress, the leftovers of this pungent-smelling, oh-so-delicious herb, make it into the salad bags and really get us salad-packers salivating when it’s mixed in. Just the smell is enough to make you really hungry, especially after a long day on the site!

I don’t think I need to tell you too much about good ol’ Basil - am sure you know him very well. All that’s left, really, is to show you this fresh, shiny-leafed variety. We grow these plants in the greenhouse, where it is nice and warm, regardless of how August is behaving….

We don’t let the plants get too big I’m afraid, basil’s always well in demand!