divaqs's Blog

4 Season Salad Garden
May 13, 2007 | 5:00 PM PST
Tags: salad , lettuce , winter garden , leaf lettuce , slugs , baby greens , spinach

One of the things I love about where I live, in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, is that the seasons are relatively mild. I figure that this is due to the many cloudy days we have in Seattle, which keep temperatures more even.

As a gardener, what this means is that I can have a year round salad garden. The trick to it is planting the right amounts at the right time. For example, in summer things grow quick, so I plant less and more often. In late summer and fall I turn a majority of my garden over to growing my winter and spring salad garden. In winter, things pretty much stop growing, so whatever I was able to plant and grow in fall is what I will have to last me through the winter. In spring, is when things start to grow again, so the smaller salad plants I planted in the fall start to get some growth on them again.

A couple of weeks ago I planted a small section of my garden with my first summer salad items. I am still harvesting lettuce and spinach that I planted last fall, while I wait for my summer lettuce and spinach to grow. In other words, the pictures below are of different kinds of lettuce that I planted last year, which either survived the winter or grew early this spring from seed still in the ground.

 

I’ve found that I like variety in my salad. I learned this the hard way. Two years ago I tried to feed myself and my family salads made from a single type of lettuce. Boring salads quickly grow unappetizing.

 

So, I now tend to buy lettuce mixes that are season or theme based.

 

 

 

Overall, I prefer leaf lettuce, since it is easy to cut back just a part of it and let the plant grow back, allowing me multiple harvests.

 

 

Being an edible landscaper, I try to incorporate aesthetics in my salad gardens by intermingling my salad plants with other companion plants. I avoid planting in rows, unless that is the shape of the area I am planting in. This makes for a much more natural and organic look to my garden, which I find much more pleasing to look at.

 

I tend to over plant, then thin out the plants as baby greens for salad. The salads made out of baby greens are really good, though it takes more time washing the smaller greens.

 

I prefer growing my salad greens in my raised garden beds, which are formed out of treated lumber. The treatment process is based on a copper compound, which seems to detract the slugs more. It doesn't totally eliminate the slugs getting to my lettuce, but I do see a lot less slug damage.