How to grow winter salad | Alys Fowler

Our gardening expert looks at rocket, mustards and oriental salad leaves in the second of a two-part special (read the first part here)

I think winter salads need a little heat to them; a few leaves that pepper the cooler greens and don’t mind being rested on by hot things, be that roasted vegetables or grilled cheese. For this you need the spicy salads from the brassica family, such as rocket, mizuna, and the many mustard leaves.

Rocket, as its name suggests, is up before the rest and races to grow, giving you substantial salads by autumn, slowly increasing in spiciness as the weather darkens. If its peppery heat is too much, try Real Seed’s ‘Mild’ rocket, which is sweet rather than fiery. By winter, cultivated rocket will have stopped growing unless it’s in a polytunnel or greenhouse. Not so for wild rocket, Diplotaxis tenuifolia, which is smaller-leaved, spicier and hardier. I love it on top of pizza.

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Gardening tips: build a stumpery

Then make a bold statement with Senecio ‘Angel Wings’ and watch a new series of DIY video tutorials

Plant this The large, silvery leaves of Senecio ‘Angel Wings’ make a bold statement in a container in full sun. It’s hardy down to -5C but won’t like cold, wet conditions, so offer protection in winter, if necessary, or bring it inside as it also makes a great houseplant. Height and spread: 35cm x 35cm.

Try this Shady spots under trees can be tricky, but a stumpery transforms a dank corner into a cool verdant retreat. Improve the soil with leaf mould or compost, then arrange hardwood logs and stumps, planting ferns, hostas and spring bulbs such as snowdrops in the gaps between.

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Homes: 'We wanted a house where we could dance underneath a disco ball'

Design aficionado Thorsten van Elten has turned a 70s bungalow in East Sussex into a playful home

Three days before Christmas, in 2015, Thorsten van Elten and his partner Karl swapped central London for rural East Sussex. “I was fully ready for a change,” says the German-born design retailer, who had lived in the West End for 20 years, after he moved to England to study interior design. “Karl’s family arrived for the holidays on 24 December, so it felt immediately like home.”

When the pair began looking to buy in the countryside, Van Elten knew a beamed cottage wasn’t going to work – he is more than 6ft tall. “We wanted a house where we could dance underneath a disco ball. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days trying not to bump my head.”

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Help-to-buy loans benefited more rich than poor households

Whitehall figures show over 5,500 households with annual income of £80,000 got loans

More rich households than poor ones are benefiting from a £25bn public subsidy that the former prime minister Theresa May claimed was “restoring the dream of home ownership for a new generation”.

More than 5,500 households with an annual income of over £80,000 have been given help-to-buy loans in the past year compared with 4,142 households earning less than £30,000, the government’s own figures have revealed. Well over 2,000 of the richest households who were awarded taxpayer-funded loans, allowing them to buy new-build houses with only a small deposit, had incomes in excess of £100,000.

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Brexit jitters grind UK housing market to a halt in August

Average house price dips to £216,096, says Nationwide, as buyer activity stalls

Brexit uncertainty is still weighing heavily on the UK housing market, which ground to a halt in August,and could take a heavier toll in the coming months, analysts warned.

Nationwide building society reported that house prices were flat in August as political and economic turbulence continued to take their toll.

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Let’s move to: Ventnor, Isle of Wight – defiantly Victorian, with a hipster sheen

The town is strung out on hairpin bends winding down to the sea

What’s going for it? Long before the climate emergency, those in the 19th century without a posting in Delhi or Singapore would come to Ventnor to experience the tropics. The town is a world apart, sunbathing alone beneath its own vast windbreak, St Boniface Down, with just the ocean for company. Its famed microclimate was catnip for Victorians. Consumptive patients desperately sucked in its warm, moist air at the Royal National Hospital for Diseases of the Chest; botanists and ecologists chased its rare butterflies, lizards and odd flora, a lost world or Galápagos just south of Newport; thrill-seekers explored Blackgang Chine, Britain’s oldest theme park; and the rest of them hit the bandstand for tea, cake and a shimmy. It remains a defiantly Victorian place, but having had its dose of inevitable seaside decline, in recent years it has acquired a light hipster sheen. There’s a lot of upcycling, vintage and keeping-calm-and-carrying-on going on, a fair amount of William-Morris-meets-mid-century-modern and a cultural scene in rude health. Though I do worry for that microclimate. Might get a tad Saharan, now the rest of the UK is turning tropical.

The case against Barely a flat surface, it’s awfully steep pretty much everywhere. Despite recent improvements, it still suffers from a seasonal economy.

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Let’s move to: Ventnor, Isle of Wight – defiantly Victorian, with a hipster sheen

The town is strung out on hairpin bends winding down to the sea

What’s going for it? Long before the climate emergency, those in the 19th century without a posting in Delhi or Singapore would come to Ventnor to experience the tropics. The town is a world apart, sunbathing alone beneath its own vast windbreak, St Boniface Down, with just the ocean for company. Its famed microclimate was catnip for Victorians. Consumptive patients desperately sucked in its warm, moist air at the Royal National Hospital for Diseases of the Chest; botanists and ecologists chased its rare butterflies, lizards and odd flora, a lost world or Galápagos just south of Newport; thrill-seekers explored Blackgang Chine, Britain’s oldest theme park; and the rest of them hit the bandstand for tea, cake and a shimmy. It remains a defiantly Victorian place, but having had its dose of inevitable seaside decline, in recent years it has acquired a light hipster sheen. There’s a lot of upcycling, vintage and keeping-calm-and-carrying-on going on, a fair amount of William-Morris-meets-mid-century-modern and a cultural scene in rude health. Though I do worry for that microclimate. Might get a tad Saharan, now the rest of the UK is turning tropical.

The case against Barely a flat surface, it’s awfully steep pretty much everywhere. Despite recent improvements, it still suffers from a seasonal economy.

Continue reading...

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