The word "salad" can mean so many different things and can have a multitude of different ingredients. As such, you can fairly easily grow yourself some kind of salad - even if it is just a potato salad!
Our typical side salad could also be called a "garden salad", and for good reason, as the ingredients within it are possible to grow in your garden. Normally ours will include some kind of leaves, often lettuce, sometimes rocket, watercress and/or spinach, then some raw carrot, cucumber, tomatoes, beetroot, maybe celery or spring onion. Most of these ingredients I have either already talked about in previous posts or I will cover in future posts, depending upon the vegetable family that they belong to. So, in this post I shall be looking at the leafy element of salads.
The most obvious salad leaf is the lettuce. When growing lettuce it is easiest to think of them as either those that form heads or loose leaf ones. With head lettuce, you wait until the whole thing has grown to form a ball then harvest the whole thing. With loose leaf ones you can pull off leaves as and when you want them and let the plant regrow. Which you grow is just down to your preferrence. As well as the typical pale green leaf varieties, you can also get red/purple leaf types, which can look very attractive in a salad.
Lettuce are quick and easy to grow. The seeds are quite small and seed packets usually contain far more than you need. They can be started off indoors or sown directly into the soil at this time of year. Once they have germinated, it is useful to thin them out so that the individual plants have plenty of space to grow. Slugs and snails enjoy lettuce so you will need to protect your plants from these pests. Lettuce also isn't particularly keen on being in full sun all day so a partially shade spot is useful. If your plot doesn't naturally have shade then you can grow them in the shade of other plants such as cucumbers or French beans.
Whether you harvest your lettuce or not, it will continue to grow and eventually decide it is time to flower. When lettuce flowers the leaves turn very bitter and are no longer nice to eat so at this point you may as well remove the plants to your compost bin. In order to try to give yourself a good supply of lettuce over several weeks rather than way more than you can eat all in one go, sow just a few seeds at a time and roughly every two weeks. This way you should have just a few ready at a time, with more coming on behind.
Another popular salad leaf is rocket. As you will have seen yesterday, rocket is part of the brassica family. You need only a few plants of rocket to supply your needs. Like lettuce, it does better with a bit of shade, otherwise it will flower and this means the leaves become depleted as the plant puts its energy into reproduction.
Watercress is often paired with rocket but this isn't really suitable for growing at home. It requires fresh running water to grow successfully and safely so it is best to leave that one to the experts. Landcress does exist as a reasonable, although inferior alternative.
The other leaf in that common trio is spinach. Spinach is very easy to grow... or perhaps rather, too easy to grow. Spinach leaves in salad need to be small and tender and spinach can quickly grow big, lushous leaves. Although these are still useful in other dishes, such as pasta, they aren't good in salad at that point. So, as with other salad leaves, a series of sowings will help to keep a supply of small leaves. It also have a tendancy to want to flower and this is made worse if in direct sunlight.
A good alternative to spinach is leaf beet or chard. These are both related to beetroot but grown for the leaves rather than the root. Again, when small, the leaves can be picked and eaten in salads. They seem to grow more steadily than spinach and are less likely to go to flower so are good alternatives.
Of course, some of the very easiest things to grow are cress and mustard. Both of these are grown until they have only just germinated and are cut to eat before the true leaves emerge. As such, they are ready to eat within just a few days and you can quickly sow more seeds to get another crop. As they only use the resources contained within the seed to grow, they don't need any nutrients from the soil so they can be grown on something as simple as damp cotton wool. This is an option for a bright window sill and can be done whether you have a garden or not.
Similarly, if I have any out of date beetroot, chard, lettuce, spinach or brassica seeds that I would otherwise throw away, I sow these into seed trays and harvest them either when tiny, like cress, or just after the first leaves have formed. These tender leaves make a lovely addition to a salad and are what trendy chefs would call "micro leaves".
Other leaves to consider are some of the bitter and/or peppery leaves such as mizuna, chicory and endive. Personally I'm not much of a fan of the flavour of these but some people love them. They are, however, handy because they can be grown from autumn and into the winter, giving you leaves for salad when other leaves are no longer available. It is certainly a good way to change the flavours and mix of your salad with the seasons.
Another handy tip when it comes to growing leaves for salad is that they can grow quite happily in old growbags. So, if you have previously grown tomatoes and peppers in growbags, the following year you can use those bags to grow salad leaves, thus getting more value for money out of your bag.
As leaves are so quick and relatively easy to grow, they are worth growing and they can easily add substance and interest to your salads, changing with the seasons.
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