Salad Garden

Indoors or out, you can create an attractive salad garden that provides fresh, crisp salads practically year round.

Stacked boxes add depth to a raised bed salad garden

Imagine walking over to a container, raised bed, or garden patch with a pair of scissors and snipping off fresh ingredients for a salad. Much like an herb garden, salad gardens can provide a variety of colors and textures to your landscape, balcony, or home, as well as delicious, fresh ingredients for your meals.

Where can you grow a salad garden?

Balconies, patios, raised beds, windowsills, towers, and containers are all the space you need to create a salad garden. You can also add salad plants in with your other plantings!

Lettuces grown alongside roses

You can use a collection of artistic planter pots, or some of those long, narrow planting containers found at yard sales and thrift stores, or you can get really creative, using takeout containers, an old wheelbarrow, or any other food safe container. And that’s really important. Be sure that whatever container you choose is rated for food use - many pallets are sprayed with a cocktail of chemicals, and some ceramic pots are decorated with toxic enamels. Once you’ve made sure your containers are food safe, it’s time to start choosing your plants!

Herbs and salad greens grow well in towers

Choosing plants for a salad garden

Start your salad garden plant selection with foods you and your family will eat and enjoy. There’s no sense using up valuable growing space on plants you don’t want. To select the best plants for your salad garden, consider the time of year each plant will be able to grow in your area. Check with your local County Extension Office and read those seed packets. You can also get all the information you need right here, online. If you will be growing outdoors, be sure to check with the USDA Hardiness Zone Map to identify your zone. You will also want to identify which plants are perennial, which are annuals, and which are biennials:
   Salad perennials — chives, patience dock, Malabar spinach, nasturtiums, perennial rocket, sorrel [If you have the space, rhubarb and artichokes provide HUGE, ongoing crops each year]
   Salad biennials — kale, parsley, Swiss chard    
   Salad annuals -- arugula, bok choy, cilantro, dill, lettuces, mizuna, radish, spinach

The perennial plants will serve as year-round anchors in your salad garden, the biennials may take 2 or 3 years before going to seed, and annuals will have to be replaced each year. Or, maybe they won’t. We will get to that in a moment.

Salad garden grown in a raised bed

One tool for helping in the garden design planning process is to get a package of 3x5 index cards and create a card for each type of plant, putting all the relevant growing information on the card. That information would include:

• light requirements
• soil requirements
• irrigation needs
• fertilization needs
• mature height and width
• annual, biennial, or perennial

You can spread the cards out on a table and move them around, to create attractive, productive groupings that will play well together. Consider the height and shape of each plant. A deep container that features tall, wispy dill in the center, offset by brilliantly colored Swiss chard, surrounded by a bright green halo of short, mounding lettuces will look lovely and taste good! Keep a lookout for hybrid dwarf varieties of many salad greens that fit better in containers. If you are growing indoors, you may need to add grow lights during winter.

Succession planting

As your salad garden begins to produce edibles, remember to continue planting new annual seeds every 2 to 4 weeks, whenever the growing conditions are appropriate for each plant. This succession planting will keep you in salad greens practically year round. The important thing about planting a salad garden is to keep planting those seeds!

Surprises in the salad garden

Some plants don’t seem to play be the rules of botany. Beets, for example, are classified as biennials. This means they are ‘supposed’ to generate a fleshy root in the first growing season, to store nutrients for the next growing season, during which seeds are produced. [By the way, beet seed-bearing stems are lovely - they look like Japanese art.] My seed-producing beets, however, have been providing me with beet leaves and seeds for over 5 years now! I use the seeds to grow new plants, and the baby beet leaves are delicious in salads. 

You can add a tiny touch of art to your salad garden with ceramic bunnies, glass balls, or tiny metal snails. Will these features help your plants grow? No, they won’t. But they might make you smile!

Harvesting your salad garden

Many salad greens can be harvested using a cut-and-come-again method. This mean you remove outer leaves, as you need them, and the plant simply generates new leaves from its center.

If you allow some of your annual and biennial salad garden plants to complete their lifecycle, going to seed, you will end up with a perpetual motion salad garden that continues to generate new edible plants each year.

While most salad greens prefer cooler temperatures, if you plan around your microclimate, you might be able to put together a salad garden that will continue producing throughout most of the year.

​What do you put in your salads?