Salad plants are handy and easy to grow -I have 4 varieties in my balcony
Check out my hints about growing and harvesting salads and about their careful consumption.
I just had diner, and the main salad contained 4 species, all from my balcony’s edible garden. Clockwise starting in the top, these are crispy lettuce, dandelion, red lettuce, and corn salad:
As I showed you in previous stories, I grow the corn salad and red lettuce from small plants bought at a local supplier (literally across the street!) and the crispy lettuce from a foraged plant I ate almost two months ago. They are all easy to grow, requiring just a lot of water and quite some sun, although ideally not the full sun of a whole, long summer day.
At home, corn salad and lettuces are allright, because my balcony isn’t perfectly oriented to the South so I don’t get full direct sunshine the whole day but “just” for around 8 hs in summer.
Then, the dandelion is even easier to grow, as it thrives in wild form in my pots. I just don’t care that it’s there, until I feel like eating it up!
A few observations of practical interest:
- Water these plants everyday, especially when it’s very hot or windy (the latter even if it’s not so hot).
- Protect them from the wind, especially so if you are high in a building like I am.
- Harvest the leaves early in the morning or a few hours after watering in the evening, so that they are firm.
- Dandelion is best when young, as older plants develop thicker, more bitter leaves.
- Make sure you water the plants with good-quality water the last days before the harvest. You don’t want to get cholera or any other nasty bug from salad watered with dirty water.
- Even if you use good-quality water, rinse the leaves very well before consuming. Even more so when you collect leaves from the wild, because the urine of some animals might carry diseases. For example, a large fraction of foxes in Europe carry the nasty Echinococcus multilocularis, which produces serious infections in humans.
This article was a specialization of these 3 other articles I’m very proud about:
Happy gardening! --Luciano
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