How to grow agretti (Salsola soda)

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One of the new things I am trying to grow this year is agretti, Salsola soda. It’s a big hit with chefs, but still new on the UK food scene and virtually untried in British gardens.

Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA 

Last year I tried to grow agretti (Salsola soda), sharing seeds with friends and what agretti growing advice I could find. It all adds up to one thing – agretti is not the easiest plant to grow. You need fresh seed, and even then germination rates are poor.

Although August is the height of the summer, and it’s worthwhile taking time to stop and smell the roses, the vegetable gardener also has to be aware that autumn is just around the corner. That doesn’t have to be a depressing thought! It just means you need to harvest any crops that won’t survive the first frosts, and that you may want to preserve some so that you can have a homegrown taste of summer during the winter months. You should have some new crops on the way to look forward to, and be thinking about potting up herbs to bring under cover for the winter.

If October starts warm it can provide a nice breathing space, to catch up late harvesting, saving seeds and generally getting the garden ready for the winter. It’s also the time to cover any bare soil, with mulches if necessary, to protect your soil structure from bad weather, and to ensure any tall plants (mainly brassicas) are staked against ‘wind rock’, which can lift their roots out of the soil. You may also need to net brassicas to stop them being munched by marauding pigeons.

Ah, April, a month that gives us leaves on the trees, blossom in the hedgerow, and a headache with its changeable weather. We gardeners would love April to be a season of sunshine and soft showers. But, instead, we need to plan for sleet and hail, or even snow. As the effects of climate change are felt more widely, we may even need to forego thinking of April as a rainy month at all, and just an extension of dry winters. It’s also at least a month before we can be relatively sure that there will be no more frosts.