Cut and Come Again Vegetables

Vegetables and herbs whose leafy food can be cut and will grow again are your ‘perpetual’ providers in the garden vegetable patch.

Growing cut and come again salads helps to avoid gluts of salad vegetables, common when vegetables planted at the same time mature all at once.

Leafy vegetables and herbs that can be grown as cut and come again, include but are not limited to basil, coriander, silverbeet, kale, lettuce, mustard salad, pak choi, parsley, radicchio, rocket and spinach.

The young leaves of many root vegetables can also be harvested and make great additions to fresh salads; beetroot, radish and turnip.

Sowing Cut and Come Again Seeds

To ensure the longest, steadiest supply of young leaves throughout the growing season, sow small batches of seed every two weeks until late summer.

Seeds can be sown in well-prepared gardens or containers. Read the seed packet to choose suitable situations for your seeds. In garden soil, where there may be weed seeds present, rows are best so that germinated salad seedlings can be easily distinguished from weeds.

Most salad seeds are very small and need only be sown shallow and covered with a thin layer of compost. A depth no greater than the width of your little finger is usually suitable.

Care

Keep seedlings weed-free and well-watered. After two weeks fertilise with McGregor’s VegeMax fertiliser.

Harvesting

When leaves are of an appetising size, use scissors to snip off a few from each plant about 2.5 cm from the base. Avoid damaging the central growing crown of the plant and allow the remaining leaves to grow on.

Water regularly to encourage the growth of new leaves.

Each sowing should provide you with 3 or 4 harvests before the plants are exhausted. Further harvests may not be good as plants will become tough, bitter or try to flower and should then be lifted, composted and the ground fertilised with McGregor’s VegeMax fertiliser and re-sown with a different vegetable.