YOU’VE bought a bag of pre-packed salad to last you the week, but the day after opening it the lettuce is curling up and going brown around the edges. Sound familiar?

One East Lancashire couple are urging people to forego supermarket-bought salad and grow their own.

Peter and Yvonne Holden, who run Rebekah’s Old Fashioned Vegetables from their nursery in Blacko, are passionate about spreading the message that you don’t need land, or even a back garden, to grow your own.

“We do vegetables that everybody can grow, no matter if they’re little children aged four or five years old or senior citizens — vegetables for everybody,” said Peter.

“You can live in the centre of Nelson in a terraced house, no back garden and you can have pots of potatoes, pots of beans, peas, and all your salad crops all in your back yard,” added Yvonne.

“We have a couple of old ladies who live in sheltered housing who come to Ramsbottom Market with their Zimmer frames to buy seeds from us. They grow on their window sills because they don’t want to buy a bag of salad in Tesco and throw it away.”

The couple sell more than 150 varieties of easy-to-grow veg from aubergines to beans, peas to turnips. They also sell more than 25 herbs.

As well as saving money by growing your own, it’s environmentally friendly too, said Peter.

“The government says we’ve to cut down on air travel and car travel yet when you go into a supermarket you see these vegetables saying ‘product of Kenya’ and you think ‘We’re flying salads in which you could grow in your kitchen. Why aren’t we?’” He said.

Peter and Yvonne sell their vegetables and vegetable plants at flower shows up and down the country from April to September. They recently won silver at Hampton Court Flower Show in the “unusual veg seed” category.

“Sometimes judges don’t like what we grow,” said Peter.

“They tend to like biggest carrots, that sort of thing, but we grow the stuff that you can buy in a supermarket. They’re not prize-winning veg, they’re veg for eating. Our seeds are dead easy, foolproof, anybody could do it.”

The company is named after their four-year-old granddaughter Rebekah, who is crazy about vegetables.

“Given choice of chocolate or cabbage, she will choose cabbage every time,” said Yvonne.

You can buy see from their online shop, www.rebekahsveg.talktalk.net, and they can usually be found on Ramsbottom Market on a Saturday.