Six Inches of Daylight: A Winter Salad Plan for London Windowsills

As of November 2026, the light outside my kitchen window is doing that thing where it never quite switches on. It’s not dark, exactly. It’s more of a permanent 3pm. And yet the tub of mizuna on the sill is still cropping, the pea shoots are reaching for the glass, and there’s a small, stubborn forest of parsley that has decided to see out the year. Winter salad on a London windowsill is not glamorous. But it is possible, cheap, and oddly good for the soul when the supermarket bags look tired and wet.

Start with the light you’ve actually got

A south-facing windowsill in November gets maybe five or six usable hours on a good day. A north-facing one gets considerably less, and that’s before the neighbours’ bins and the Victorian brickwork get involved. Don’t fight it. Choose leaves that tolerate low light and slow growth: mizuna, mache (corn salad), land cress, winter purslane, mustard greens, rocket, and pea shoots grown indoors. These are not going to bulk out a Sunday roast. They are going to give you handfuls — a few leaves to fold through a lunchtime omelette, a peppery layer under a poached egg, something green on a cheese sandwich in February.

If you have a balcony, you have more options: a cold-frame cloche, a cheap plastic mini-greenhouse, or even a clear storage box with the lid propped open. But the principles are the same. Small containers, free-draining compost, and a willingness to sow little and often rather than one heroic tray that collapses in week two.

The November sowing plan

This is not a precision operation. It’s a rhythm.

• Week one: Sow a shallow tray of mizuna and mustard. Use a seed tray or a clean mushroom punnet with holes punched in the bottom. Cover with a clear lid or cling film until germination, then remove it immediately.
• Week two: Start a small pot of pea shoots on the kitchen windowsill. Dried peas from the wholefood shop work fine, though garden pea seed is more reliable. Soak overnight, sow thickly, cover with an inch of compost, and keep them warm-ish. You’ll be cutting shoots in three to four weeks.
• Week three: Sow mache and land cress in a separate container. These are slow but hardy. They will sit there looking like nothing much until January, then suddenly become dinner.
• Week four: Start a small pot of parsley or chervil indoors. Coriander is possible but sulks in low light; don’t take it personally.

After that, resow a small tray every fortnight. A windowsill isn’t a farm. It’s a production line of tiny harvests. Cut-and-come-again leaves will give you two or three cuttings if you leave the growing crown intact and feed weakly once a fortnight with a general liquid feed diluted to half strength.

Where to buy seeds without spending a fortune

You do not need a glossy catalogue. London has quiet, cheap sources if you know where to look. Columbia Road flower market on a Sunday has seed stalls tucked between the Christmas trees and the houseplants; allotment societies often run seed sales in late winter; and the odd garden trader at Borough Market will have hardy salad varieties in paper packets. Seed swaps are worth seeking out too — a packet of mizuna shared between three people is plenty.

If you’re buying from a market stall, check the sow-by date on the back. Old seed germinates erratically, and erratic germination is the quickest way to lose interest in a windowsill garden. Spend your money on fresh seed of a few reliable varieties rather than a bargain bin of hopeful unknowns.

The damping-off problem

Damping-off is the quiet killer of indoor sowing. Your seedlings come up, look promising for four days, then flop at the base and collapse in a grey fuzz. It’s caused by overwatering, poor airflow and cold, soggy compost. The fix is mostly boring: use clean containers, water from the bottom, let the surface dry between waterings, and don’t cram the tray under a lid for longer than it takes to germinate. Once the first green loop appears, get the cover off and put the tray somewhere with good light and a bit of air movement. A small fan on low, or a window cracked open for an hour, is enough.

If a tray does collapse, don’t try to rescue it. Bin the compost, wash the container, and start again. This is the harsh but useful lesson of windowsill gardening: small batches mean small failures.

What to expect, honestly

By mid-December, your windowsill will not look like a salad aisle. It will look like a collection of small, slightly scruffy pots. The mizuna will be leggy. The pea shoots will lean. The mache will test your patience. But if you keep sowing little and often, you’ll have fresh leaves for sandwiches, soups and late breakfasts through the darkest weeks. And when the light finally returns in February, you’ll already have a head start — not because you were clever, but because you kept going.

That’s the whole project, really. Six inches of daylight, a few packets of seed, and the refusal to buy a sad bag of rocket in January.