Salads offset the beautiful colours of marigolds. Credit: Getty Images
Mark Diacono offers his top tips to sow, grow and cut your own salad and shares his favourite varieties.
When I was a child, salad was a limp lettuce with salad cream, a half dozen slices of glassy cucumber, a medium-sized tomato zigzag-halved through its equator and a ragged pile of cress. Never mind the internet and being able to telephone people wherever they may be, the real advance of recent decades has been on the salad front.
Supermarkets sell a wide range of interesting leaves, often in agreeable combinations, but whether it’s a single-leaf salad or a tumble of colours, texture and flavours that you prefer, no salad is better than the one you grow yourself.