Garden salad with baby carrots, radish, spring onion and radish pods

I am getting a backlog of lovely posts that I want to share – overdue recipes for cooking with a glut of lettuce, two homemade summer drinks, and the last of what I got up to with the little sister (and more importantly what we were eating!).

However, for now I wanted to share this delicious garden salad we had tonight.  I’m very proud of the fact that everything was grown by me from seed.  This was a salad that I truly nurtured.

Here’s everything seconds after being pulled from the earth or cut…

Baby carrots – a type called Paris Market Baron that produces carrots that are fat and round.  Perfect for anyone growing in rocky soil!  And radishes – my favourite kind, French Breakfast, with their elegant long body and crisp white tips that gently blush to a deep pink…

Pretty spring onions – sorry I can’t remember what type they are!

Vibrant green Little Gem lettuces…

And my edible discovery of 2010 – that you can eat radish seed pods!  A big thanks to Alys Fowler and her series The Edible Garden for opening my tastebuds to the joy that is radish pods.  Simply leave some of your radishes to flower (or if you’re like me they do this out of neglect…), then the flowers turn into these elfin shaped pods and eventually fatten up.  Eaten they – unsurprisingly – have a radishy taste…

After trimming the hairy roots from the spring onions, washing the dirt from the carrots, slicing the radishes into discs and arranging them all in a pretty dish this is what it looked like…

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Rainbow radishes

I took these photos about a week ago but haven’t got around to posting them yet.  Up until this year, the only type of radishes I’ve grown (and my favourite) are French Breakfast – those gorgeous elongated pink bulbs which fade to white around their middle.

This year, I was tempted by a packet of Rainbow radishes and here’s the first harvest.  So far we have pulled up pink ones, red ones, purple ones, yellow ones and white ones.  They are all very fiery – especially the yellow and white kind.  However, they are so pretty I can’t complain.

We have nearly finished with the first lot I planted, and the next lot are nearly mature.  Other than herbs and the odd baby leaf, these are the first harvest from our garden.