Lush & Lovely: Growing Leafy Greens

Fresh-picked homegrown salad greens are a wonderful summer staple. Toss them with a light herb vinaigrette and create a refreshing side dish for your backyard BBQ. Or load them up with fresh fruits and veggies, wholesome nuts and seeds, and flavorful meats and cheeses for a hearty, healthy main course.

Growing your own tender greens, and making sure that you have a steady supply cropping up throughout the season, is easy to do. It just takes a little prep work and planning. Willi Galloway, freelance writer and creator of Digginfood.com, is an avid kitchen gardener and food lover and has these helpful tips to share:

1. Start with finely prepared, weed-free soil. Most salad greens have very small seeds that don’t compete well with weeds. For perfect salad-growing soil, weed your lettuce bed three weeks before transplanting or direct sowing. Spread compost one inch thick over the soil and dig it in. As you work, remove rocks, hard clods of soil, and crop debris. Rake the bed until the soil has a fine, crumbly, brown sugar-like texture, then water the bed well. When the first flush of weeds appears, cultivate lightly, remove any remaining weeds and water well.
   
   
2. Plant seeds or seedlings. If you’re starting from seed, keep in mind that lettuce seeds need light to germinate. Sprinkle seeds on top of finely prepared, moist soil and cover them with an extremely light layer of screened compost or a little potting mix. Gently pat the seeds to ensure good soil-to-seed contact and then water them in with a sprinkle of water from a watering can. Keep the soil consistently moist.
   
   Seedlings are a nice option, too. Though more expensive than seeds, they mature quickly and are almost foolproof. Transplant in the late afternoon so they won’t bake in the sun all day, and make sure they’re well hydrated prior to planting. Water them in with a little diluted fish emulsion and they’ll settle into their new digs in no time.
   
   Note: Slugs love lettuce. Keep these slimy pests under control from the get-go by sprinkling an organic iron phosphate slug bait, such as Sluggo or Escar-go, around your lettuce bed at planting time.
   
   
3. Harvest your crops. Harvest baby greens when they reach about four inches tall and have formed a thick strip of leaves. Use scissors to cut the row of greens down, leaving a one-inch stub behind. After harvesting, pour one cup of diluted fish emulsion on the row to encourage the greens to re-grow quickly

For larger greens and heads of lettuce, you can harvest individual leaves by pinching them off at the base of the plant, or harvest the entire plant by sliding a sharp knife just under the soil line and slice the plant away from its roots.

Molbak’s 2011 Lettuce Varieties (starts):

Which is tastiest? It’s a toss up!

• Buttercrunch
• Little Leprechaun
• Lollo Rossa
• New Red Fire
• Red Romaine
• Red Sails
• Romaine Parris Island
• Royal Red
• Salad Bowl
• Simpson Elite
• Speckles