Growing Salads and Leaves – The Tips For Success
Salad
By fenwench on 2014-07-02 16:31:49
Whatever the size of your growing area, the most important thing is to make the most of it.
The Tips for success
Many salad plants can be long-lived when they are correctly chosen for the season and well tended. This is a key aspect of successful growing, enabling you to enjoy high production for small areas. Which plants are grown and how they are picked is as important as your general sowing and growing techniques and careful choosing and tending of plants really can make even containers and window boxes capable of producing enough leaves to be a good asset to the table.
Sowing at the right moment also makes an important difference. The season, and the weather all play a part in becoming more aware of their changes will bring you extra knowledge and health., not least from having more leaves to eat.
Start in a small way, but also experiment with lots of different salad plants to see which ones grow best for you and provide leaves which you enjoy eating. Soon you will get the hang of managing an interesting range of plants at different times of year to keep those healthy harvests coming.
It is advisable for people with large gardens to scale down their salad area and manage it more tightly. Larger beds are useful for those plants needing lots of room to grow, such as the wide range of hearting plants.
Small spaces can profit from the use of large containers, which may even be quite shallow for salad, as long as they are well watered in dry weather. The small volumes of such containers compared with gardens and raised beds, means that good quality compost must be used, both to retain as much as moisture as possible, and to provide enough nutrients for steady and significant growth.
A seasonal approach achieves more abundant harvests and healthier leaves, because insects that live off certain plants are only prevalent at certain times; avoid growing them in those periods and growth will be healthier. Also, with the changing seasons come frequent and fascinating changes in salad flavour.
To summarise:
Quality is the main reason for growing your own leaves.
Sow seeds thinly for picking individual leaves, more thickly for cutting rows or clumps.
Wider spacing give healthier leaves over a longer time.
For picking you can choose to cut baby leaves or pick medium-sized ones, depending on salad type and your preferences.
Harvested leaves will keep for days if cool and moist
One sawing for each season can be enough to have leaves all the year around (fewer in winter).
