Unless, of course, you plant it now, keep it warm, then pick it young.

These days you can buy packets of ''mini greens'', usually a mix of rabbit ear lettuces (the one shaped like, well, rabbit ears), spinach, with maybe some rocket for bite. But any green veg can be sown in shallow trays now - after all, they won't need deep roots. Take the trays outside when the air is above freezing, or keep them in a sunny spot in the warmest room in the house, and they should give you tiny, sweet and nutritious leaves for salads or stir fries within three to four weeks.

A useful tip - with a few exceptions like lettuce, seeds don't need sunlight, or much light at all, to germinate, so you can start your trays anywhere, even in a spare shelf of the wardrobe. Seedlings, however, do need light to grow. The more heat, light, water and tucker they get (up to a point), the faster they'll grow, and the more you can harvest.

Realistically, allow three weeks of harvesting small leaves, and plant a new tray every week so you get a continuous supply till the summer veg in the garden are ready to pick. You may get your mini veg to crop a lot longer, if you have the perfect spot, and feed them with a good organic soluble fertiliser - look for instructions on the packet, as brands will vary.

Don't use a slow-release fertiliser though. These are excellent from early summer onwards, but often won't release their tucker in cool weather. Hopefully your mini darlings will be snug 24 hours a day tucked up in a corner of your living room, spare bedroom or the patio, but it's best to be sure.

So what to choose? If their fate is to be stir fried, go for baby bok choi, mini pak choi, choi sum, mizuna or tatsoi, or variations on Brassica rapa. For a slightly more pungent taste, try shungiku, or edible chrysanthemum, which is NOT your Mother's Day chrysanthemum, though a close relative. Do not eat your Mother's Day chrysanthemum. It was bred for beauty, not for breakfast.

Kale and collards, eaten young, are a most excellent veg. I find the adult versions a bit tough, like eating a green linen skirt.

Any of the cabbage family make excellent mini greens, and if picked young enough also make excellent salad greens. Chinese and Savoy cabbages are the most tender, but drumhead or red cabbages et al are also good if picked at baby size. The baby leaves of broccoli, broccolini and cauliflower also make good eating. They are almost indistinguishable from cabbage when picked very young.

Baby celery leaves are sweet and deeply flavourful, long before there's much stem to speak of. Try adding them to potato soup, which will then become a rich potato and celery soup.

Corn salad is also flavourful, but definitely a cold season veg - it will become unpleasantly strong as soon as the weather warms. (Apologies to those who love it in mid summer - I know you exist). I have even eaten a delicious mid-summer cheese and salad sandwich that contained corn salad - but only a very small amount, grown in dappled shade and well-watered, and mitigated by superb home-made mayonnaise. Fennel is another veg whose leaves need to be used sparingly, even when tiny.

If your plate can cope with more flavour, go for endive - especially the red varieties - or mustard greens. My favourite babies are the red serrated-leafed varieties, but any will be good. Baby beetroot will also give a touch of colour to a spread of green, especially if you can find the ''Ruby Lips'' variety, bred especially to be grown fast and eaten young, as a leaf and not a root. There is also a most decorative red-leafed sorrel which I find a bit bitter, or rather extremely bitter once the leaves are finger sized. Pick very young indeed. It's best added discreetly to the mix, or blended into a creamy sauce for a bland fish.

And of course we are back to spinach, and good old silver beet. It's no use my picking the young leaves of my mature sliver beet as baby veg - by the time they unfurl they are already bigger than my hand. Baby silver beet leaves must be planted fresh, and now.

I've left the best to last - lettuce, any lettuce. Plant now, plant lots, and watch them germinate fast and deliciously, and eat them tiny, hardening you heart when you think of a long lettuce life cut short.

And if there are any of your little darlings still alive when the soil has warmed up? (NB The air usually warms faster than the soil). You can try planting them out, but as by then they have been picked so often, they may decide their earthly joy is done, and run to flower, seed, then die.

Or you may be lucky. In fact there's nothing to lose by planting out the survivors - if they run to seed they'll do it fast and small, and take up little room, so can be easily plucked out and left on the soil to mulch your summer lettuces, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini ... and my mouth is watering, even if last autumn I vowed never to eat zucchini again. Bring on the ratatouille.