If you have never grown vegetables before and always wanted to grow your own food, but don’t have the time or space for a full-size outdoor garden – container gardening is a good place to get started. You don’t need a lot of space, and it requires a relatively low level of commitment: You can grow your own greens in a window box, on a deck or right on your countertop – no weeding required!
Grow Your Own Super Simple Salad Box
If you have ever looked at a garden and thought, “Oh, that’s not for me,” or “That looks like too much work,” or “I don’t have space for that,” I’d like to introduce you to the salad box. It requires nothing more than a super simple setup in your outdoor space, and once you have got your seeds planted, you just water them enough to keep the bed from drying out. A salad box is proof of how much edible goodness you can actually grow with very little space, very little effort, and very little time.
If you are looking for an ideal way to plant lettuce, kale, spinach, or other greens, then this will be the perfect solution for you. Choose small salad leaf plants and perhaps some small herbs to plant up the box. Greens are one of the easiest crops to grow indoors. Grow spinach, lettuce, mesclun mix, mustard or kale and you can begin to harvest micro-greens within a month!
Cut-and-come-again crops are a good choice as you can pick just a few leaves at a time and they don’t require a huge amount of patience from the budding gardener. Grown from seed they germinate quickly and are ready to harvest in afew weeks.
For the really impatient, garden centres often sell cut-and-come-again salad leaves in small, inexpensive multi packs for a satisfying, instant garden or for absolute beginners that want to have a go but don’t want to grow from seed.
With the right materials and a little know-how, you are just weeks away from fresh, homegrown salad greens at your fingertips. It’s very easy to learn how to grow salad greens in a container garden – both indoors and out. It is not difficult to learn how to care for your salad container garden.
Microgreens
Microgreens are the seedlings of leafy greens, vegetables and herbs. They can have up to 40 times more nutrients than their mature counterparts, and the vivid colours, intense flavours and array of textures can bring any dish to life.
A small portion of microgreens can provide you and your family with a sufficient source of essential nutrients and vitamins! Nutritious and easy to grow, microgreens are a garden goer. When your salad greens are covered in winter frost, microgreens add home-grown colour, texture, flavour, crunch and class to salads, soups, sandwiches, stir-fries, pizzas, pies and dips.
They are also very healthy, containing on average, five times the level of vitamins and carotenoids than their mature plant counterparts. Second only to sprouts, microgreens are the quickest food crop that urban gardeners can grow.
Tiny But Mighty
If you are limited on time, space, or lack gardening skills, microgreens are the perfect solution as they are cheap and easy to grow, take up little space and are usually ready in 1–2 weeks from sowing.
So, if you have been thinking about growing more greens or even starting your first garden, a salad box or growing micro greens would be the perfect introduction to kitchen gardening. Once the leaves on the greens are a few inches tall, it’s time to start harvesting.
You won’t be growing full heads of lettuce like the ones you buy at the store. The idea is to harvest a few leaves at a time from each plant and then let them grow again. That way, the plants won’t take up too much space and you will get multiple harvests. Harvesting is easy. Using scissors simply cut the greens 1 inch above the soil line, leaving a few larger leaves in the center to keep plants healthy.
Lettuce, spinach and mesclun greens will grow back to yield another harvest in a couple of weeks. After a few harvests the plant stems may get thick and the leaves may remain small. This indicates it’s time to compost the potting mix and roots, and start over.
Depending on the size and number of containers planted, your harvest may continue for many weeks.
Yes, you can have your super healthy garden!
It’s time to take command of your life through lifestyle changes.
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