TLC – Tender Leaf Care

May 2010

The long hot summer we surely deserve seems slow in coming… With frost on the ground in mid May our baby leaves are certainly feeling the chill but that’s not a bad thing.  As growers, who like to understand the science behind what we do, we have found the colder the nights the slower the leaves grow, which allows our leaves to grow stronger and tastier!  Leaves can grow in two ways: grow more cells or stretch the existing ones to make them bigger.  The choice makes the difference between a yummy leaf and one that looks worse for wear; a leaf that is made of big, puffy cells will be fragile and bruise easily which affects the leaves when harvested.

Aside from doing all the good farming stuff, like soil fertility and moisture levels, we wanted to make sure we only grow strong, small celled leaves. I’ve got some pals at Southampton Uni to ponder this and they managed to find out the answer – Xyloglucan endotransglucosylase or XET for short!  This is an enzyme that plants make to soften cell walls, but when the XET is used up the walls re-harden and the cells become bigger and weaker.  So too much XET activity isn’t a good thing for our leaves!

Theory suggested that touch turns off XET in leaves so an unfortunate student was set to work brushing trays of our baby leaves grown in a glasshouse with a sheet of paper.  Some got 10 strokes a day, some got hundreds of strokes all through their growing cycle.  The result was remarkable – the more stroking, the less XET they found in the leaves which proved excellent news! More importantly to us, when the small leaves were washed (in spring water of course!) and packed, they tasted far better than their unstroked counterparts.

We applied this learning to our growing.  Dedicated as we are we couldn’t get up the motivation to stroke all our leaves every day for weeks on end.  But we twigged that growing them in reasonably windy places was the next best thing!  So in winter you’ll find our baby leaves swaying in the breeze on the Atlantic coast of Portugal or in a valley in Spain.  In the summer we grow near the coast in Kent and on high ground in Wiltshire.

The team is out every week sampling all our lovely salads so keep updated on where they might be by logging on to Twitter!  The link to our page is http://twitter.com/stevesleaves  

Lastly don’t miss out on your chance to win one of ten fantastic overnight stays for two at a very special Hand Picked Hotel.  Just buy any pack of Steve’s Leaves (you’ll need the pack batch number), then enter your details in the form on our website by 30th October.