Home grown salads
| Published: 22nd April 2008 15:44 |
Fresh and crisp or aromatic salad leaves are a popular and healthy addition to summer dinner plates, but stacking up on prepared leaves can be costly with a bag of rocket leaves costing over £1.50 in many supermarkets. What's more, as the leaves are technically dead once picked, they lose some of their flavour and crispness once picked along with a limited shelf life. The easy answer is to grow your own.
The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) advise that for continuous production of salad plants you should sow seeds on a fortnightly basis throughout the spring and summer. Choosing several varieties with different maturing times will also help to keep the salad garden productive. By sowing seeds in succession, your whole crop will not run to seed at the same time.
The growing season for salads begins in early spring if you are able to sow seeds under cloches and frames or in a greenhouse. The best thing about salad leaves, however, is that they can be sown throughout the summer right up until September for varieties that can last through autumn and early winter. Over-wintering salad crops include winter hardy varieties of lettuce or spinach, Oriental greens such as mizuna, rocket and also claytonia, corn salad and sorrel.
Sowing seed directly outdoors is the most widely used method for growing summer lettuce crops. The precise details may differ slightly between varieties, but generally a sowing depth of 1cm to 1.5cm, with the rows about 30cm apart, works best.
Many salad leaves can be harvested as needed leaving plants to grow on to produce more leaves. If the harvesting is too severe, it may take some time to resprout, so sow a succession of rows or several containers.
If you lack space in the garden a few containers near the house would make a suitable salad garden. Use growing-bags, pots or troughs. Larger tubs for growing salads are easier to keep watered than small pots. Used growing-bags can be used for a crop of salad leaves at the end of the season.
Tips for successful salad growing:
Plenty of water is essential if your lettuces are to grow and develop well and to have a tasty, tender leaf texture. The soil should always be kept just moist, which is particularly vital when the lettuces are one or two weeks away from being ready to harvest. The best time to water is at the end of the day.
If you want to start the crop off early or prolong the cropping period into the autumn/winter, cover the plants with cloches or fleece. Ensure that the temperature and humidity doesn't get too high though.
Some crops can be grown a bit later to produce a harvest in autumn or even later. Always follow the instructions on seed packets carefully, as not all lettuce varieties are suitable for sowing throughout the entire season
.
Whether you're sowing early or late in the year, it's important to remember that lettuce seed is likely to become dormant if soil or compost temperatures are too high. Anything above 25°C (77°F) will potentially reduce levels of germination.
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