Salad days are here again
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F YOU are pining for a fully fitted kitchen garden but you don’t have the space or time, downscale your ambitions a little. You can keep yourself supplied with fresh, healthy, home-grown salads all summer from a small bed with rich, well-drained soil or containers on a patio or balcony.
Choose a sheltered spot that gets sun for a few hours each day for your salad patch – leafy crops don’t want a searing hot suntrap. If you are making a bed, work some well-rotted organic matter into the ground and beef up the nutrient levels by raking in a little blood, fish and bone fertiliser.
If you are relying on containers, choose large tubs or troughs, place a few handfuls of gravel in the bottom for drainage, then fill them up with multipurpose compost. Alternatively go for growing bags. Just lay them flat on the ground and cut the tops out.
Now you can get growing. To make life easier, you can buy young salad plants from a nursery or garden centre, although the choice is often limited. You’ll find several types of lettuce ready to plant now and in six weeks’ time you’ll also be able to buy pots of parsley, leaf coriander, chervil, chives, sorrel and basil. They all provide tasty salad leaves and you’ll get lots from a small space – even a windowbox.
But it is far cheaper to grow your own salads from seed and you can start now. If using a small bed, sow some short rows of lettuce, mixed salad leaves, spinach, French sorrel, rocket and hardy annual herbs such as chervil and parsley.
If you are going to use growing bags or containers, sprinkle seeds very thinly all over the surface of the compost to make the very best use of space. Place a little potting compost over the top to bury the seeds then water them in.
Once your seedlings come through and turn into small plants you can start snipping a few individual leaves at a time, leaving the plants to keep growing so you can come and cut again.
Do this with lettuce too rather than letting them form hearts and then cutting the whole plant. Frilly red Lollo Rosso is good for this job as it grows for months before running to seed. ARE of a salad bed is easy. Keep the compost moist all of the time and from June onwards liquid feed every week to keep the plants growing vigorously.
Once shortterm crops such as baby spinach leaves are over, pull those plants out, which gives longer-lasting kinds such as rocket and herbs space to spread.
By late June sow Chinese leaves, pak choi or red mustard. And if looks matter, add smallflowered violas, chives and a dwarf calendula marigold as they all have edible flowers.
It couldn’t be easier, as long as you allow five minutes for watering every other evening and 15 minutes a month for sowing or replanting.
Then enjoy salads on tap.