Salad Days

Pssst! Wanna know something great? Wanna save some money Mrs? Do you, do you?

Well, first you'll have to find yourself one of those supermarkets, Aldi or similar, where they sell cut-and-come-again lettuce in the little punnets. In the Aldi nearest me, a mere 15 miles away, they sell a windowsill version for 79p. I kid you not, there must be 50 baby lettuces in this plastic container. If you have little or no space in the garden you might want to pick up a bag of compost from the store too at a cost of approximately £1.99. So that's £2.78.

When you get home feel free to snip away and have a lovely salad for tea or you could leave these juvenile leaves intact and instead, gently prise the plants apart at the roots. Then either dot them around the garden, ideally in a moist, sunny spot, or cut a long rectangle in your compost bag and plant your lettuce seedlings in there.

Water well and within days you'll have healthy little lettuces, without the bother of raising seedlings yourself. You can pick these leaves by snipping with a scissors at their base and, quite wonderfully, the little stub that is left, (apologies if I'm teaching granny to suck eggs,) will regrow its leaves within a week or so. Lettuce for all summer if you're clever...... and how much is a full lettuce? Well in various supermarkets I found lettuce heads from 57p (for a round lettuce) and £1 (for an iceberg.) With my method a single lettuce head could cost as little as 5p, if you're using a growbag and a whopping 1p if you're not. Not bad eh?

Still got to buy the salad cream, obviously.

Yum.

[By the way, I'm not on a retainer for Aldi, this is me, a nerdy customer/gardener, shopping wisely.]