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Corn Salad

Veg Type:

Leaves

Growing Location:

Indoors and Outdoors

Often considered a weed, corn salad (also known as lamb’s lettuce) is a super-hardy and low-growing winter salad with a mild, nutty flavour. It is one of the winter-hardy salad leaves we sow at GROW HQ in the late summer and early autumn to last through the winter. We generally do a couple of sowings every two to three weeks from September to keep us going, with occasional pickings of winter leaves until the new season salads arrive in spring.

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Sowing

Corn salad is usually grown as an autumn/winter salad, but can be grown year-round.
For an autumn/winter crop sow in August and September.
It can be sown in modules and transplanted, but is easier to sow direct.
If sowing direct, sow thinly 1-2cm deep in rows 15cm apart.
If sowing in modules, sow one seed per module and transplant when they have outgrown the tray, spacing them 10cm in rows 15cm apart.

Growing

The crop can be thinned to 3-5cm between plants, which tends to give larger leaves, but will happily grow unthinned.
It is a relatively slow grower, but will keep growing in all but the coldest weather.
Keep the area weed free and moist if the weather is dry.

Harvesting

Cut the growing tips from the plants with scissors when about 5-8cm tall. New shoots will grow back.
You should get around 3-4 harvests throughout the months.
The shoots are still usable when the plants begin to flower, though tend to become unusable when the flowers mature.

TIPS

Corn salad is a surprisingly strong performer when it comes to nutrition, and is one of the healthiest of all salads. It has three times as much vitamin C as lettuce and more iron than spinach.
Corn salad is often known as lamb’s lettuce.

Problems

Slugs can be a problem in a wet autumn, so protect using traps or a less toxic slug killer such as iron phosphate.
Fungus diseases can attack the older leaves in a wet autumn, though young growth will usually be unaffected.

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