If you’ve ever eaten fresh salad greens grown near your home and picked only a few days ago, count yourself lucky. The difference between fresh greens and the stuff in bags in the store is so striking that they almost can’t be called the same food.
Even the premium and organic varieties of salad greens lose something when they’re picked and packed 2,000 miles from your home and shipped to the grocery store on a truck. They’re also among the least eco-friendly of foods, since they have to be transported quickly by refrigerated truck. With the advent of plastic clamshell packaging for salad greens, there’s also the solid waste disposal issue to contend with.
After eating locally grown lettuce and other salad greens, it’s hard not to come to the inevitable conclusion that they’re really only good when picked fresh. It’s hard to go back to bag lettuce after you try locally grown, or better yet, grow your own.
Fortunately, salad greens are among the easiest garden vegetables to grow. Even a tiny patch of earth will yield an amazing harvest of greens, and they mature very quickly – usually within one month of planting. If you don’t have room for a small plot of greens, you can do quite well with a container on your deck or balcony in a partially sunny spot, or even with an Aerogarden on a table in the corner of a room in your house.
The trick with growing fresh greens is to keep them moist and cool. They grow wonderfully in the early spring and late fall. In the summer, be sure to shade them from direct sunlight so they don’t turn tough and bitter. Water them frequently to keep them from drying out.
The easiest way to get a good salad mix is to buy a seed packet that contains a blend of popular salad green varieties. These include:
* Leaf lettuce
* Endive
* Arugula
* Mizuna
* Mesclun
You might also want to start a separate plot of spinach to use for salads and cooking.