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Getting Started: Salad-Garden Basics
by Karan Davis Cutler
While our ancestors didn't know 'Early Girl' tomatoes or 'Red Sails' lettuce, they knew a good deal about growing salad crops. "Close to his cottage lay a garden-ground,/With reeds and osiers sparely girt around;/Small was the spot, but liberal to produce..." begins Virgil's "The Salad," a poem written 2,000 years ago. His image of a salad garden is still timely: a conveniently located small, fertile plot protected from the wind that will yield generously.
Those with land to spare can spread their lettuces, carrots and tomatoes over a half-acre or more. A 100-foot row will produce 85 pounds of onions, 120 pounds of cucumbers or 150 pounds of cabbage, but few of us need harvests this large. Fortunately, we can also farm in Mason jars, clay and plastic pots, wood tubs and raised beds that measure 2 feet by 2 or 5 feet by 20. We can tuck cabbages between daylilies and shasta daisies and cultivate chives on the windowsill. The secret to salad gardening isn't how large the growing area, but how good.
Except in hot regions, where protection from the afternoon sun is sometimes necessary, most salad crops do best in full sun. For gardeners with a less-than-perfect location, it's a relief to know that some crops, including beets, carrots, chives, cress, endive, looseleaf lettuce, parsley, radishes, scallions, spinach and turnips, will succeed with only five or six hours of direct sunlight a day. All plants prefer to be out of the wind, though they also want good air circulation, which will help them ward off diseases. "Evil aire," warned Thomas Hill, the author of The Gardener's Labyrinth (1577), "doth not only annoy and corrupt the plants...but choke and dul the spirits of men." And women.
Hill also talked about water, not only the need for adequate moisture but the need for well-drained soil. Ground where "the watriness shall exceed" will dash a gardener's enthusiasm faster than an invasion of Japanese beetles. Carrying water isn't much fun either, so try to locate your garden near a water source if you know it is unlikely to receive the one inch per week of rain that most vegetables need.
Soil Basics
Soil pH
While we'd all wish for humus-rich loam, the chances of getting it are about as good as catching wind in a net. Before you begin amending and enriching, however, it's smart to determine what you have. Most vegetables do fine with a pH between 6.0 and 7.0. The majority of soils fall in that range, so a pH test probably isn't necessary unless you suspect yours is highly acid or alkaline. But it is useful to analyze your soil makeup with a simple "jar" test: Take a half-cup of garden soil—dug vertically like a core sample—and place it and about two cups of water into a straight-sided clear-glass jar. Screw on the lid and shake. When the sample settles, it should be nicely layered: The sand will rest on the bottom, the silt above it, clay atop the silt, and the organic material will float on the surface. You can measure and calculate the exact percentage of each, or just eyeball it to know whether you're working with sand or clay. Mostly sand? More humus will give it body. Mostly clay? More humus will open it up.
Fertilizer
In addition to friable soil, plants need an assortment of chemical elements. Three of the half dozen most important—carbon, hydrogen and oxygen—are available from air and water, but the remaining big three must be supplied by the soil: nitrogen (N), which promotes quick growth and deep green foliage; phosphorus (P), essential to root development and flower and seed production; and potassium (K), which helps plants resist disease and cold and aids fruit production. Most salad crops grow best in moderately rich soil that has an equal supply of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Many gardeners overdo the fertilizer, though; if you regularly add compost and other organic matter to your garden, no additional fertilizers should be necessary. And by adding humus you'll be improving the soil's tilth at the same time. The ancient—and wise—rule is to feed the soil, not the plant. When earthworms become plentiful, it's a safe bet that your soil is healthy.
Preparing the ground
For cold-loving crops like peas, it's a good idea to prepare the ground the previous fall. I use a spading fork to turn the section of my vegetable patch that will be planted first, then cover it with shredded maple leaves mixed with horse manure, which will break down over the winter. In spring, as soon as I can get in the garden (the traditional test is to squeeze a fistful of soil—if it forms a firm sticky ball, it's still too early to be gardening), I scratch in what mulch remains with a cultivator and plant. The rest of the garden is turned in the spring. If you use a rototiller, as I do, don't get carried away. Garden soil is not improved by being pulverized to the consistency of river sand.
Planting & Transplanting
Sowing & thinning
Most seed packets provide recommendations for planting depths and spacing. Take them seriously. Seeds sown too deep will rot, especially in cold, wet soil, and plants set too close together will never have a chance to develop fully. That's not a great problem with lettuces—you can harvest six small plants rather than one large one—but carrots or radishes that are crowded will fail to form roots. It's painful to rip out healthy young seedlings, but close your eyes if you must, take a deep breath and yank.
Salad crops that begin their careers indoors, such as tomatoes and peppers, need an early start but not a too-early start. Plants sown prematurely become weak and leggy, so err on the late side, and don't begin tomatoes and peppers more than six weeks before the frost-free date, especially if you're gardening on a windowsill and not under artificial lights. I use standard-sized 10-by-20-inch trays filled with tapered cells-small, medium and large, depending on the crop-and a potting mix I put together with equal parts compost, garden soil and perlite. Any planting containers will do—clay pots, milk cartons, Styrofoam coffee cups, pie pans-as long as they have bottom drainage and aren't excessively large. Two basil seeds are lost in a 10-inch pot filled with damp soil.
Commercial seedling mixes work as well as my home-made potting soil. Just be sure the medium you use is sterile-waking up to a flat of toppled seedlings, victims of the "damping off" fungus, is as discouraging as discovering woodchucks have moved into your garden. Keep the soil damp and provide plenty of warmth, at least 65¡ F, to speed germination. Once the seedlings emerge, move the flats to a spot where they will receive bright light but are away from cold drafts or drying heat. Water carefully— keeping the soil moist but not wet—and feed as needed. If you've sown in a nutrient-poor medium, such as vermiculite, peat or perlite, the plants will need to be fertilized: water twice a week with a weak solution of fish emulsion (two teaspoons emulsion to one gallon water). And thin, removing all misshapen or weak plants first, then enough plants to eliminate crowding.
Transplanting
If you've been a real early bird, your seedlings will need to be transplanted to larger, deeper containers before it's time to take them outdoors. Handle them gently as you move them to larger quarters, and provide them with the richer soil they now need. Most salad crops transplant well, but carrots, cucumbers, spinach, summer squash, Swiss chard and turnips are fussy, so take extra care not to disturb their roots, and avoid handling any seedling by its stem. But don't avoid handling it: Research shows that seedlings that have been gently brushed every day (use your hand or a piece of paper) are stockier and stronger than those left untouched.
Ten days before a plant goes into the garden is the time for "hardening off," the horticultural equivalent of adjusting to leaving home. Many gardeners use cold frames for this process, but I simply move my flats to a shaded, protected location on my patio for three or four hours, then bring them back inside. Each day I extend their time outdoors and expose them to increasing amounts of sun and wind. By the time I'm ready to plant them into the garden, they're spending both day and night outside.
Save an evening to plant out, or take advantage of an overcast day. Most salad vegetables should be set slightly deeper than the depth they were growing in their pot, and tomatoes should be buried at least half-way up their stem. After you firm the soil around the transplant, water it with a weak solution of fish emulsion and provide some protection from sun and wind for the first three or four days.
Increasing Your Yields
Whether you plant in tidy rows, broadcast seed in beds or garden in containers, two techniques will help ensure a steady supply of salads: succession planting and interplanting. One form of succession planting involves sowing in spaces vacated by other crops-planting a row of beans, for example, where the radishes had been—or planting short- and long-season crops, such as radishes and beans, together. The radishes will be pulled long before the beans demand all the space. Succession planting also refers to making small plantings every week or ten days, rather than one large planting. Lettuce, scallions and beans are among the salad vegetables that can be planted in succession. Many crops, such as spinach and peas, can be sown again in midsummer for a fall harvest. Breeders have made succession planting even easier by producing "early" and "late" varieties. I can set out 'Earliana' (60 days), 'Early Round Dutch' (80 days) and 'Apex' (100 days) on the same day in early spring and harvest cabbage from June until October.
Interplanting, or intercropping, is another way to have a constant supply of salad vegetables and also to increase your garden's yields. Small vegetables can be tucked between larger ones—onions mixed in a bed of broccoli or spinach. When you're mixing plants in a single bed or row, be aware of each plant's root requirements: Shallow-rooted plants, such as garlic, endive or spinach, are best matched with deeper-rooted vegetables like tomatoes. Or combine large sun-loving plants, such as tomatoes or peppers, with shade-tolerant leaf crops like lettuce or spinach, which will benefit from the shadows thrown by their taller partners. Finally, don't limit intercropping to the vegetable patch. Many salad crops are wonderfully ornamental—lettuces, cabbages and kales come immediately to mind—and can join the true ornamentals in your flower garden.
Still another way of increasing yields is to do what cities have
done—grow up. Cucumbers are natural candidates for trellising. Training
the vines to ascend not only saves room, but also produces straighter, cleaner
cucumbers and, according to more than one study, actually increases the number
of fruits. Tomatoes should be staked or caged, rather than left to sprawl, and
other vining plants, such as Malabar spinach and peas, do their best when
allowed to follow their natural bend and climb.
A last method of expanding the harvest, at least for northern gardeners, is to extend it through the use of insulating covers, such as cold frames, plastic-covered tunnels, floating row covers and heavy mulches. Eliot Coleman's The New Organic Grower's Four-Season Harvest is the last word on the topic, the essential reference for salad gardeners who want to harvest lettuce, spinach and carrots long after common sense deems it possible. The growing season, Coleman explains, is limited to the warmer months, but there are no limits on the harvest season. I cry "uncle" in November, long after the first frost, but Four-Season Harvest makes clear that I could be cutting parsley in December, January and even March, if I wanted to.
Closing Down
The work isn't over when the last turnip is pulled. Then it's time to think ahead—to prepare and enrich the soil for next year's salads. After cleaning up the garden—especially spent tomato plants, which harbor diseases—I sow a "green manure," a cover crop of rye or red clover. It squeezes out weeds in late fall, protects the soil in winter and, when tilled under in May, enriches the soil. Any part of the garden not planted with a green manure I blanket with at least 6 inches of mulch—a mix of compost, shredded leaves, hay and horse manure.
This is the time, too, for planning next year's garden, taking care to rotate the placement of my salad crops. Crop rotation not only helps the soil, it reduces problems from diseases and pests. The basic rule is not to locate the same thing in the same place year after year. Better still, avoid planting a spot with another member of the same plant family— preferably for three or four years, but at least for a year. Tomatoes and peppers are both members of the family Solanaceae, so I don't plant peppers where the tomatoes grew last year. Instead, I'll put the cucumbers where the tomatoes grew, and plant peppers where the peas were.
As the snow piles up outside, I plow through the mail-order seed catalogs. They offer variety that isn't available at the local garden center, everything from new-minted F1 hybrids to open-pollinated old timers, such as 'Black-Seeded Simpson' lettuce and 'Dinner Plate' tomato. Disease resistance ranks high on my list of priorities, so I'm on the lookout for abbreviations such as "VF," which indicates that the variety is resistant to verticillium and fusarium wilts. And I take advantage of regional seed companies, firms that specialize in cultivars that will thrive in my near-Arctic conditions. Then I take a serious look at my orders, admit that my family couldn't possibly consume 19 different lettuces, 13 radishes, 11 tomatoes, 9 beans, 9 cucumbers, 8 carrots, 6 peas, 5 spinaches, 4 scallions, 3 peppers, 3 summer squash and an assortment of other greens, and I cut the order by two-thirds. A salad, after all, is a simple thing.
Karan Davis Cutler, guest editor for Salad Gardens, is the former managing editor of Harrowsmith Country Life magazine. She wages a never-ending battle with Vermont's stoney soil.