Growing Your Summer Salad
After a long and hot summer day, nothing is more refreshing than a crisp cool green summer salad. Summer salads are not only good to eat, but they are good for you. The best salads, however, cannot be bought, but you can grow them quite easily, even if your space is limited. Fresh salad greens plucked from your own garden are superior in taste, crispness, and texture to almost anything you could buy. Salad greens, sprouts and edible flowers enough for at least one, if not more, can be grown in as little room as a plantar box. Of course, the bigger your space, the greater the variety of greens and salad vegetables you can plant.
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How to Begin
To start, you'll need to figure out what you enjoy in your salad and how much room you have to grow it in. Basic varieties of greens that are hardy in almost every planting situation include spinach, green coral lettuce, red coral lettuce, baby beetroot leaves, butterhead lettuce, and mignonette lettuce. Herbs of almost every variety can do well in a window or plantar box as well. Edible flowers that do well in tight spaces (or large ones) include broccoli, cauliflower, artichokes, chive and garlic blossoms (or other flowering onion plants), clover, dandelions, fuchsia, honeysuckle, lavender, as well as many more. Be careful of which parts of the edible flowers are actually edible before you use them as some parts of edible flowers can be toxic and cause serious stomach problems.
Once you've decided what you want in your summer salad garden, it's time to start growing. If you grow your salad greens from seed, you can start harvesting in as little as six weeks. You can begin seeds directly in your garden or transplant them from a seed raising-tray after the seeds have germinated and each has sprouted at least three small leaves. All salad greens, herbs and most edible flowers grow best in full sunlight, so be sure to find a sunny spot to plant them. Water them regularly and keep the soil well-fed with a fertilizer high in nitrogen.
Harvesting
When harvesting greens for your summer salad, pick the leaves of the plants from the outside as you need them. This will encourage new growth from the center of the plant. If you don't harvest too much and kill the plant, leaf crops can last up to six months of harvesting if your growing season allows. This means you'll be able to eat crisp, fresh salads all summer long and into the fall. To get the fullest flavor from your summer salad, pick your greens as close to serving time as you can manage.
When harvesting herbs, use the same rule of thumb as when you are harvesting your greens. Pick the herb leaves from the outside of the plant. The fresher you pick and use your herbs, the more bold the flavor. If you generally like the taste of your herbs to be a bit more subtle, try hanging them to dry for a few weeks before use. You can also do this with your herbs to store them for use when the growing season is over. Herbs can be and are used in more than just summer salads.
Edible flowers are generally used raw and as garnishment to a salad or cold dish. They can also be used to brew teas and herbal drinks. When you are harvesting edible flowers, do not wash them as they can loose their flavor that way. Just be sure to check them well for insects before garnishing your dish with them.
