Grower’s Corner – salads
Lettuce and leafy greens are known to be easy to grow and very good for you, so even a novice gardener can get started with them, but to grow really first class salad greens you need to provide them with a rich, well-drained soil with a pH between 6.0 and 7.0 and deal with pests and the risk of bolting.
To prepare the ground, give the lettuce bed a nice thick layer of compost well dug into the soil before planting. Lettuce can be directly seeded into the garden whether planted in single rows or broadcast in wide rows or you can make lettuce shapes by marking them out drills and dribbling the seed along them or you can even grow lettuce in your flowerbeds.! Whichever route you choose, plant seeds no more than half an inch deep or according to packet directions. Lettuce seeds require light and constant moisture for germination so remember to keep the soil consistently moist.
In the heat of summer, cool season greens such as lettuce tend to bolt or go to seed. Once a plant shows signs of bolting which means growing vertically with a seed stalk in the middle, it becomes bitter and unpalatable. Bolting is triggered either by a cold spell or by changes in day-length. The real problem with bolting is that while it is only seen on crops that are fairly mature it is actually initiated much earlier in the growing period – for example when you bring lettuce seedlings out from a warm greenhouse or window sill to a chillier garden. To avoid bolting, adjust indoor grown seedlings slowly to outdoor temperatures and try shading lettuce in hot weather to prolong the harvest – you can do this by planting in partial shade or under taller plants, such as tomatoes, corn, or beans. Some commercial growers use shade cloth to block as much as 45% of the heat.
With some ‘fashion’ crops such as rocket and spinach, just plant in late spring, bearing in mind that they will bolt sooner or later and then as the weather peaks in high summer sow radicchio, endive and Chinese cabbage to crop during autumn and early winter. By September you can start sowing hardy lettuce again.
If your garden is particularly prone to bolting try some of the new crops to be eaten raw when young and cooked when mature, like Pak Choi, an oriental vegetable which is great in salads but also good in stir fries.
Salad pests include slugs and snails and this is the range of ways you can try to deal with them:
- Beer. Place commercial traps or old margarine tubs on top of the soil close to the damaged plants, wait until dusk and then fill them with cheap beer you can find. The next morning, they should be filled with happily drowned slugs. Tip out and repeat every evening
- Copper. Slugs get shocked when they touch this shiny metal so consider gluing old copper coins around the tops of your containers or wrapping copper wire around them.
- Nematodes – water these microscopic predators onto your garden when the weather conditions are right and they get inside the molluscs and kill them off from the inside!
- Citrus rinds like lemon, orange and grapefruit left overnight near slug-prone plants will draw the predators away from the plants you want to protect. Next morning gather them up, slugs and all and dispose of them appropriately
- Vinegar. A spray bottle filled with plain white vinegar is a great cure for slugs that aren’t on plants. While it is an effective mollusc dissolver, vinegar is also an herbicide—so don’t get any of your plants in the path of the spray.
Salad and slug trap photographs by sa_ku_ra and Tony Austin, used under a creative commons attribution licence