Grow Your Choice of Gourmet Salad Ingredients

Growing your own salad ingredients in your backyard garden makes having healthy gourmet salads right at your fingertips easy! There are several lettuces and other greens that are fast growing and easy to maintain. The added advantage is that they also are very beautiful showing off different shades of color and texture. They can be grown in rows in your vegetable garden, planted in containers placed on your deck or patio, or edge them around a flowerbed.

Lettuce is a cool season crop, as are many salad greens and vegetables that go into a salad including spinach, cabbage, radish, and peas. Cucumbers and tomatoes being summer crops help bridge the gap. Many salad greens have different colors and textures. It is fun to grow a mix of lettuce varieties and this will keep your gourmet salads very interesting with different flavors too. For the best growth for the longest period of time keep the soil moist and well weeded. Once lettuce bolts into a flowering stalk, its taste becomes bitter and unusable.

The classic iceberg head type of lettuce is very crisp and takes a long time to mature, where the looseleaf varieties mature easily and quickly. Some looseleaf lettuces include salad bowl which is oakleaf shaped and lime green, red sails that are ruffled bronze-burgundy, and black-seeded Simpson that is light green and crinkly. Butterhead or bib (sometimes called Boston) lettuce forms loose heads that are soft (rather than firm) in structure. These varieties range in color from lime green to red or red edged to dark green. Romaine lettuce grows upright heads that shed water easily and grow best where the springs are wet. Forming barrel-shaped heads is Batavian or French summer crisp.

More salad loose greens to add interest and taste include arugula which has a peppery flavor, endive or escarole with a nutty and bitter taste, and mache which has a very tender and mild taste. Mesclun is a blend of several gourmet salad greens that can be mild, pungent, or bitter depending on what mixture you choose. Swiss chard and spinach both have smooth to crinkly leaves.

Other vegetables you can grow to add to salads are turnips and scallions. A Japanese sweet variety ‘Hakurei’ and the French ‘De Milan’ turnip variety can be sliced raw or shredded into your salad mix. Scallions, also called green onions grow in bunches and have no bulbs. These are perennials and their clumps just need to be divided. A variety of scallions called ‘evergreen hardy white’ even grow over the winters in Maine.

Dayelle Swensson is an avid writer for the web on a number of topics. Having gardened herself for many years, she is able to advise others about a variety of things including gardening tips, lawn and tree care, watering, hose reel and keeping your home garden looking attractive and healthy.