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Salad is a weird word. Look at it.
Admittedly I have been looking at the word ‘salad’ for the last 30 minutes which may contribute to the fact that it seems to have lost all meaning. At this point if you told me ‘salad’ was the name for a kind of ancient Middle Eastern headdress worn only by royals and religious leaders I would totally believe you.
Anyway, it’s not a kind of ancient Middle Eastern headdress. In fact, the word ‘salad’ has Latin roots; it originated as ‘herba salata’ (or ‘salted greens’); a name thought to refer to the ancient Roman pastime of dunking lettuce in salt for added flavour. And while I’m certainly a fan of chucking salt onto pretty much everything, the subsequent additions of vinegar and olive oil definitely upgraded the whole ‘salad’ experience.
Nowadays the term ‘salad’ is as loose-fitting and generous as a Shar Pei’s skin. Let a bowl of pasta cool to room temperature and - hey presto! - it’s a salad! Take some fried bacon, mayonnaise, crispy croutons, eggs and anchovies, toss them together and throw a handful of romaine lettuce on top and - bam! - it’s a Caesar! A quick tour of google reveals such travesties (or genius??) as ‘pizza salads’, ‘Big Mac salads’, ‘jell-o salads’ and ‘marshmallow salads’. I think perhaps the modern salad is simply anything that fits in a big bowl and pretends to be healthier than it is.
Anyhoo. The ancients were onto a good thing and even as late as the 14th century salads were still modest assortments of sensible ingredients, among them lettuces, parsley, watercress, borage, sage, mint, fennel, chives, onions, leeks and purslane. Sound familiar? How many of these have you got growing in your garden at the moment?
The happy truth of the matter is that if you want to create the kind of salad that actually deserves the title ‘salted leaves’, you’re in luck: you can fill your backyard with ingredients to make your own leafy bowls of deliciousness all year round!
…You can also add potato.
Why grow your own salads?
They may not be as instagrammable as a bright red tomato or a giant zucchini (both of which you could also totally throw into your salads, by the way) but if you’re thinking about starting an edible garden, leafy greens and herbs should always be your first step.
These edible leaves give you bang for your buck. They’re the kitchen essentials, the infinitely re-workable, stalwart vegetables that will be there for you all year round and ask very little in return. They’re pretty resistant to nibbling critters and don’t take up much space. They can easily be grown in pots and are the best kind of vegetable to grow if you want to reduce your packaging and plastic waste (the amount of packaging used for herbs and pre-washed lettuce is abhorrent!!). To top it off, they’re one of those veggies that, when eaten fresh, is incomparable to the shop-bought variety.
Edible leaves, as far as I’m concerned, come in two varieties: salad leaves, and herbs.
Salad leaves
‘Salad leaves’ is a pretty vague term for a whole load of different leafy vegetables. To start with, let’s go through just a few of the different kinds of greens you could be adding to your salad.
For mild flavoured greens you can grow lettuces, kale, silverbeet, spinach, cress, beetroot leaves, baby broccoli leaves, sweet potato leaves, broad bean leaves, kang kong (a great one to grow in a pond) and purslane. For peppery greens you can try rocket, mizuna (a kind of mustard green), nasturtium leaves and chicory. For lemony, herbaceous or sweet leaves try sorrel, fennel leaves, carrot tops and pea shoots.
And that barely scrapes the surface because within many of those categories there is a wide variety of exciting things to try growing. For instance, there are heaps of delicious varieties of lettuce and mustard greens (I love buttercrunch lettuce and mizuna). If you want to explore all the different varieties, growing from seed is a great idea and will allow you to work your way through as many as you like!
Herbs: the under-appreciated heroes of salad
Don’t think I’m going to let you just plant a bunch of lettuce and stop there.
You need herbs!!!! Herbs are even easier to grow than salad greens, and many of them live longer too. They also happen to be a totally under appreciated ingredient in leafy green salads. People tend to assume they’ll be too spicy or strong-flavoured to chuck into salads in any great quantity. I should know, I was one of those people until very recently, when a recipe from
set me straight. Alison makes a leafy herb salad that embraces herbs boldly and unflinchingly, and it is great.Grow some herbs. Make bold salads.
And, while everyone else is out picking through sad, limp leaves in supermarket lettuce bins and staring down plastic packets of sludge-ifying coriander, you’ll be skipping through your own homegrown meadows of kale, silverbeet, sorrel and sage, without a care in the world and feeling smug as all hell.
Convinced? Good. Here’s how to do it.
The technical stuff
Sunshine and water
Many salad greens have delicate, paper-thin leaves, which means they don’t hold onto a lot of moisture and can perish quickly on hot days if they’re planted in dry soil or sitting out in the baking sun. This is especially true for things like lettuces, mustard greens, silverbeet, rocket, cress and sorrel.
Lettuces and mustard greens in particular do better as a cool weather crop, although you can grow them through summer as long as they’re grown in partial shade. If you’re growing these greens in summer, find them a spot where they’ll be protected from the afternoon sun (they’d be happy in dappled shade too) and mulch well around them to help lock water into the soil. Don’t worry too much if they look a bit wilt-y in the midday sun, just give them a good drink of water in the afternoon and they should have perked up by evening. In winter, these plants will do best in full sun.
For tougher salad greens that will tolerate our hot summers, try growing rocket, sorrel, silverbeet, kale, fennel, beetroot, radishes and broccoli - these plants have sturdier leaves and more resilient root systems, making them tougher in hot weather. They can go in full sun in summer, but make sure your soil is rich and moist and that they’re well watered.
Growing for continual harvests
The great thing about most salad greens is that you can enjoy long harvests because you don’t pick the whole plant in a single go. This is called ‘cut and come again’ harvesting - you pick only the older outer leaves of the plant, leaving new leaves to shoot out from the centre for future harvests. Some plants (like kale and silverbeet) are perennials - these can be harvested little-by-little for months, even years! Other plants (like lettuces) are annuals - they will give you a few solid weeks of continual harvest before they start to flower and set seed.
The best way to achieve a year-round supply of herbs and greens is to grow a mixture of perennials, as well as both cool-weather and warm-weather annuals. To help you pick what to grow, I’ve added a list of annual and perennial greens and herbs to the bottom of this newsletter.
If you decide to grow annual herbs and greens (like lettuces, coriander, caraway and rocket), my best piece of advice is let them flower and set seed. A lot of people miss out on the gorgeous flowers that burst forth from lettuces, coriander and the like. They see their plant beginning to ‘bolt’ (growing taller and reaching skyward), notice that the leaves don’t taste very good anymore and incorrectly assume the plant has served its purpose and that it’s time to rip it out. STOP RIGHT THERE. You are missing, like, half the best bits!!! Not only are the flowers beautiful (coriander, caraway and dill flowers look like Queen Anne’s Lace), they are brilliant for attracting a wide range of beneficial bugs to your patch. What’s more, once they’re finished blooming, they will produce seeds, which you can harvest and cook with (in the case of coriander, fennel and caraway), or simply resow to fill your garden with more greens next season.
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Growing in pots vs. garden beds
Most salads greens (e.g., lettuce, cress, rocket, sorrel) have shallow root systems and will grow happily in containers or direct in your garden beds - the choice is up to you. The important thing is the quality of the soil. Salad greens like rich, moisture-retentive soil, so make sure you’ve given your soil a good boost before you start planting and don’t let them dry out on hot days (a lack of water can quickly turn even the tastiest lettuce leaves quickly).
The majority of herbs also do fantastically well in pots. In fact, most of my herbs do better in pots than in the garden. A lot of perennial herbs (like thyme, sage and marjoram) don’t mind the winter cold, but they don’t like getting ‘wet feet’ (i.e., sitting in soggy soil). After a few winters of repeatedly killing these herbs in our garden beds, I shifted them to pots where I could limit the amount of water they got over winter by changing their location as the weather cooled. Now they enjoy winter vacations on our warm, sunny and dry balcony and I haven’t had a single death!
If you want to grow your own lemongrass (you should, it will transform every curry you make for the rest of your life), I strongly recommend you put it in a pot as it can get HUGE and very difficult to remove if left to do its thing in the garden bed. This is another lesson I’ve learnt from experience (getting my arms sliced up by lemongrass fronds while trying to dig out a massive root ball was, let’s say, not one of my favourite pastimes). Same goes for mint - pop it in a pot or it will slowly but surely invade your entire garden!
I prefer to grow herbs like parsley and basil in garden beds, as they can get lovely and big if allowed to grow to their full size in the garden. In its second year, parsley can grow up to a metre tall and will produce beautiful umbel shaped flowers that the bees love! Basil, too, tends to fare better in the garden. If you want to pop it in a pot just make sure to go for a nice big one.
Growing greens indoors: Romantic? Sure. Worth it? Nope.
Attempting to grow herbs and salad greens indoors is - quite frankly - a waste of your time. I see so many books with recommendations for ‘windowsill herbs’ and it’s a romantic idea, but in practice most of the time it just doesn’t work.
Our houses are nearly always a lot darker than we think. Even bright window sills usually don’t have enough sunlight to sustain most edible plants for very long. Without adequate sunlight, these plants grow ‘leggy’ and weak and - usually - die. If you want thriving herbs and salad greens - put them outdoors and in a spot where they get 6-8 hours of direct sunlight (preferably morning sunlight) each day.
Growing your plants outdoors is also the perfect excuse for YOU to go outdoors more often. Evening salad harvesting with a cocktail in hand beats plucking anaemic leaves off pale bench-top basil any day!
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What to grow:
To help make sure your garden is providing you with year-round greens, aim grow as many of the herbs and greens off this list as you can - they are all very easy to grow and totally deserving of a spot in your garden!
Annual vs. perennial herbs & greens
I group my herbs and leafy greens into three categories:
Perennial herbs that will grow for multiple years
Biennial herbs that last only two years, flowering and setting seed in their second year, and
Annual herbs that will only last me one season.
Depending on your climate, these lists might be slightly different for you (if you have cold winters most herbs will need to be treated as annuals because they won’t make it through frosts). Fortunately, most perennial herbs will survive a Perth winter if kept relatively dry and in a sunny position. The only herb that almost never makes it through a Perth winter is basil.
Most annual and perennial herbs love warm weather and will thrive in your summer garden, provided they get enough water. One exception is coriander, which tends to go to flower quickly in the warmer months. Many gardeners see this as a drawback (once coriander starts to flower the leaves can lose their flavour and become a bit tough), but I see this as a wonderful bonus. Sow your coriander seeds in autumn, harvest the leaves for your dinners all through winter and, in springtime, enjoy the gorgeous flowers (which are brilliant for attracting beneficial bugs to your patch!).
Perennial herbs & greens
Mint
Oregano
Thyme
Sage
Marjoram
Lemon grass
Lovage
Tarragon
Thyme
Lemon verbena
Sorrel
Winter savory
Chives (although to be honest, chives take an age to grow, I’d rather grow society garlic - a tough perennial with garlicky leaves that you can use just like chives, and beautiful purple flowers that taste like garlic)
Fennel
Kale
Silverbeet
Spinach
Cress
Sweet potato leaves
Kang kong
Sorrel
Biennial herbs & greens
Parsley
Caraway
Chervil
Beetroot leaves
Broccoli leaves
Carrot tops
Annual herbs & greens
Summer savory
Basil
Coriander (does better in the cooler months - it can quickly go to flower in warm weather, sow yours over winter then enjoy the flowers in spring)
Dill
Chervil
Caraway
Broad bean leaves
Mizuna
Rocket
Nasturtium leaves
Chicory
Pea shoots