Advice
RHS Help & Advice
Growing salads and herbs
Succession
For continuous production of salad plants you should sow seeds on a fortnightly basis throughout the spring and summer. Choosing several cultivars with different maturing times will also help to keep the salad garden productive. Many salad leaves can be sown in wide drills and the leaves snipped as needed or thinnings used, leaving plants to grow on at final spacings. Cut and come again salads can take some time to resprout, so sow a succession of rows or several containers.
Extending the growing season
Start early in the spring by sowing salad plants under cloches and frames. If you have a greenhouse, conservatory or sunny windowsill sow indoors and grow plants on ready for planting out when the soil warms up.
Sow seed in September for overwintering salads. Suitable crops include winter hardy cultivars of lettuce or spinach, or try Oriental greens such as mizuna, rocket and also claytonia, corn salad and sorrel.
Herbs such as chives, mint, marjoram, parsley, or tarragon grown outdoors can be potted up and brought in for the winter. Plants can be kept on a windowsill or in a greenhouse or conservatory.
Pots
and containers
If you lack space in the garden a few containers near the house would make a suitable salad garden. Use growing-bags, pots or troughs. Larger tubs for growing salads are easier to keep watered than small pots which may suit some of the herbs.
Spent
growing-bags can be used for a catch crop of salad leaves
at the end of the season. Culinary herbs such as basil, parsley
and tarragon will grow well on a sunny windowsill.