Salad Leaves for All Seasons

Organic Growing from Pot to Plot

Charles Dowding

• Publisher: Green Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780857844668
• eBook ISBN: 9780857844682
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

Known as the guru of no-dig, Charles Dowding has updated the definitive book on salad growing in this hardback, beautifully illustrated edition. In it he shows how to have tasty salad leaves all year round in a garden, balcony or windowsill, whatever the weather & grow healthy plants grown in healthy soil using organic, permaculture principles.

PART ONE

GROWING LEAVES

CHAPTER ONE

HIGH YIELDS, SMALL SPACES, SPECIAL METHODS

LEARNING NEW TRICKS

You do not need a large garden to grow good amounts of leaves. Small beds or containers can produce surprisingly large harvests. Whatever the size of your growing area, the important thing is to make the most of it.

Salad leaves are a great starting point if you have not grown food before. They reach harvest rapidly, look attractive while growing and bring a sparkle to many meals, with almost no preparation time.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

Salad plants can be long-lived when they are correctly chosen for the season and well tended. This is a key aspect of successful growing, enabling you to enjoy high production from small areas. Which plants are grown and how they are picked is as important as your general sowing and growing techniques (see Chapter 2 for more details). Careful choosing and tending of plants makes even containers and window boxes capable of producing enough leaves to be highly worthwhile over a long period.

Charles picking salad for sale at Homeacres in spring.

I share many tips about sowing at the best moment for each salad plant. The season, the moon and the weather all play a part, and growing your own food helps you to be aware of important natural rhythms. This is empowering knowledge which brings health, not least from having more leaves to eat.

FIRST STEPS

Keep your initial purchases small and simple. Catalogues and shops are full of expensive accessories that are not necessary. The main things you need are seed and/or plants, a container or bed to grow them in, some good compost, a watering can and, above all, sufficient time to tend your plants on a regular basis. Once a growing space is set up, the main work of salad growing is to pick the leaves.

Start in a small way, but also experiment with lots of different salad plants to see which ones grow best for you and provide leaves which you enjoy eating. Soon you will get the hang of managing an interesting range of plants at different times of year to keep those healthy harvests coming.

LARGER SPACES

If there is room outside and you want plenty of leaves, think about a bed along the lines of those in Chapter 3, which measure 1.2x2.4m (4x8'). Over a trial season, these produced weekly harvests of around 1-2kg (2-4lb) of mixed leaves between late April and mid-October, then rather less until Christmas.

Once the materials are sourced, you can assemble new beds rapidly and in almost any location – on top of grass, gravel or paved areas. An open space is better than against a wall, because more light will give better growth.

In view of the productivity of well-tended salad plants, my advice to anyone with a large garden is to scale down their salad area and manage it more tightly. Valuable compost is then concentrated on a smaller space and there is less weeding and watering.

Larger beds are useful for those plants needing room to grow, such as the wide range of hearting plants. Study the book and plan a growing space to be in line with your intended harvests.

You can keep one bed fully productive throughout a growing season by resowing or replanting as soon as gaps appear. Check the information in Part Two, Chapter 9, to see which plants are coming into their period of most productive and healthy growth, according to the time of year.

SMALLER SPACES

Small spaces can profit from the use of large containers, which may even be quite shallow for salad, as long as they are well watered in dry weather. The large round lettuce pot in Chapter 4, page 45, which yields leaves for three months off a dozen plants, has a diameter of 63cm (25"), a depth of 22cm (9") and contains about 40 litres of compost. Or look at the recycled plastic window boxes, which measure 100x 20cm and are 15cm deep (39x8x6"). They hold 15 litres of compost and offer worthwhile yields of leaves for a long period (see Chapter 4, page 44).

The small volumes of such containers compared with gardens and raised beds means you must fill them with good-quality compost, both to retain as much moisture as possible and to provide nutrients for steady and significant growth. Organic composts are available to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE: GROWING LEAVES
• PART TWO: SALAD LEAF SEASONS OF HARVEST
• PART THREE: A CELEBRATION OF OUTDOOR LEAVES
• PART FOUR: INDOOR PLANT RAISING AND GROWING
• Resources: (organisations, suppliers and publications)
• Index
• Also by Green Books
• Copyright