Advice
RHS Help & Advice
Salads through the season
With a little planning, it is easy to grow salads year round, even in tiny gardens, and avoid the glut-famine cycle.
Salads can be gathered all summer from frequent, small-scale sowings. Salads are only fresh and wholesome for a few days, especially in hot or wet weather, and they do not store well. Sowing little and often is key to avoiding periods of excess or shortfall (see successional sowing).
Some plants are all or nothing: radish is pulled or hearted lettuces cut once and there is no regrowth, so you need a constant succession of maturing crops. Others such as rocket or chard are more obliging. You can pull off leaves as you need them and more grow; continuity is much easier to achieve. In fact, all salad crops can be sown thickly and the immature leaves gathered over a long period, when large enough: commonly called ‘cut-and-come-again’ (see below) , this technique is ideal for small gardens.
In cold weather plant growth is slow, so there is a longer interval between sowings in spring than in summer. You might, for example, sow lettuces twice in April, three times in May and four times in June. As a rule of thumb, make the next sowing after the first two true leaves have formed on the previous crop. Most households will find 1-2m-long (3-6ft) rows plenty. In cold, wet or dry weather, raising plants indoors in cell trays filled with multipurpose potting media is more reliable than outdoor sowings.
Sometimes cultivars mature at different rates, which helps to spread the harvest; ‘Little Gem’ lettuces are a lot speedier than butterheads, and big cos lettuces are slowest of all to mature.
Successional sowing
Sowing a little seed fortnightly ensures gradual harvesting, rather than a glut of mature crops - followed by a famine! Small hearting lettuces (e.g. ‘Tom Thumb’) take 10-12 weeks to mature. Sown under cover in February, then outside successively from March to August, they can be harvested from April through to October.
Cut-and-come-again
Some salads can be cut when young (left), and will re-grow, providing two or three harvests before going to seed. Try ‘Salad Bowl’ lettuce, perpetual spinach, endive, rocket, radish leaf, lollo rosso, corn salad (lamb’s lettuce), and loose-leaf chicory. Successive sowings ensure leaves are available for cutting after the first sowings lose productivity.
Hardiness
For winter salads, grow hardy plants such as spinach, corn salad, rocket, hardy lettuce, and land cress. Sow half-hardy salads (e.g. summer purslane and mizuna greens) in midsummer, for summer and autumn harvesting. They bolt if sown before late June.
‘Instant’ sprouts
Try germinating mustard and curled cress, and edible sprouts on moist tissue paper, for instant salad garnishes. They can be grown year-round on a windowsill.
Perennial pickings
Young dandelion and sorrel leaves taste good in salads. Pick when in active growth, usually February to October.
Sow in containers, growing-bags, window boxes, or seedbeds (if possible). Good drainage, regular watering and constant temperatures (10-20°C) are necessary. Cold frames and fleece protect early and late outdoor sowings from cold; shade and irrigation protect from summer heat. Alternatively, sow in the greenhouse. Cut-and-come-again salads need no thinning; others are thinned gradually, leaving the strongest plants well spaced, or sown in containers and transplanted once sturdy.
Maya Albert