Home-grown Salads - How to grow yours?
A freshly picked salad from your own garden tastes delicious and, by growing your own you can enjoy healthy meals all summer long.
A variety of luscious salad crops, herbs and edible flowers will give any salad dish more flavour, texture and colour. Sowing the seeds in small batches every couple of weeks during mid Spring to late Summer will ensure a continuous harvest.
Luscious Leaves:
Lettuce is the mainstay to a salad meal and there are several varieties available with a choice of leaf colour.
Cos or Romaine has long, narrow leaves and grow best in cooler climates.
The popular Iceberg lettuce has very crispy firm leaves.
Varieties like Lollo Rossi and Lollo Bionido are loose-leaf lettuce, ideal as cut-and-come again plants as you can pick individual leaves when needed and no waste!
Lettuce tends to bolt and run to seed if grown in full sun so semi-shade is preferable for planting.
For an added kick add peppery Rocket and nutritional Spinach to salads.
Versatile roots:
Succulent summer fruits:
No salad is complete without Tomatoes, Peppers, Spring Onions and Cucumber.
Tumbler and Tumbling Tom look and taste gorgeous grown in hanging baskets.
Spring Onions and Peppers are undemanding plants, and Cucumber needs plenty of watering.
Tasty Sprinkles:
Adding some herbs can spice up salads and your tastebuds! Try Coriander, Parsley, Sweet Basil (delicious with Tomatoes), Chives and Fennel.
Edible flowers bring an attractive flourish to the salad platter. Nasturtiums have brightly coloured flowers and a peppery taste, and Perlagoliums flowers taste divine. Borage flowers have a cucumber taste.
