GREEN waste recycled by homes has helped a Pewsey Vale salad-growing industry pick up a top national award.

Vitacress Salads, which runs a 50- acre farm at Manningford Bohune, has won one of the industry's top awards for its green growing practices. The company produces organically grown salad crops for Sainsbury supermarkets across the country and Marks and Spencer food halls.

Hundreds of homes in Hampshire put out green waste to be recycled and this has been collected by Onyx Environmental Group working in conjunction with the county council.

The waste is turned into compost which is supplied to Vitacress to nourish and nurture its salad crops grown in the Pewsey Vale.

To complete the organic cycle Vitacress sends its own waste salad leaves back to Onyx for composting.

In the last three years Vitacress has used 30,000 tones of the compost, equivalent to a year's output from every single garden in a county the size of Wiltshire, to boost its crops.

A spokesman for the company said: "The results have been spectacular. The weeds have been controlled, the soil is bursting with fertility and more than 250 tonnes of baby leaf spinach, lollo rosso, wild rocket and tango salads, a total of 1.5 million supermarket salad bagfuls, are now being produced a year by Vitacress under Soil Association standards."

Last Friday the company was presented with one of the horticultural industry's top awards, the Worshipful Company of Fruiters' Environmental Award for Production.