- So, I wanna talk about salads in this video
and how to kind of get an endless supply of salad
from late spring through to early autumn.
This is basically aimed at if you're just starting
to grow vegetables, this is a nice little challenge
that you can do
but the great thing is is that it's so easy.
So, this area here is basically six by six foot,
that's two by two metres
and this is keeping us as a family of four
fully supplied of salads
and we've actually got excess salad.
So, right at the start I began
by planting a couple of rows of radish
which for the harvest of this growing season
from this garden from things
that we've planted this year.
So, it's nice to have the radish.
I then planted down spinach and rocket
which I've grown in modules
and those have been really, really good,
even though the spinach has gone to seed quite quickly
because we've had a period of warm weather.
We're still harvesting a lot of the leaves
and the rocket is seeding
but we're still obviously getting
a lot of its leaves as well,
and so I've got a few radish plants left
because I'm gonna try saving the seeds
but the idea is if you want to have a endless supply
of salad is that you don't need much space, okay?
You can do it on your balcony,
you could even do it on your windowsill
if it's just for one of you
and the most important thing though
is to think succession planting.
So, we've been harvesting this bed
for probably at least two weeks
and yes, the mustard is going to seed a bit
but I reckon we'll have at least another three weeks
of really productive harvest from the area.
What I'm gonna do is where I've planted the radish
I'm then really soon going to sow it with some more lettuce
and mustard greens which is what you've got growing here.
So, once the harvests start to decline in this area,
that area just literally there
is already gonna be ready to harvest
and we've got so much that, you know,
it's almost as if we might as give some away
to our neighbours for free
because I think that's a really important value.
If you have too many harvests and you can't store it
because salads, you know, it's quite perishable,
then the best thing to do is to share it
with your friends and your family and your neighbours
and I think that's really important.
So, to begin, what you need to do in early March
is to start sowing your lettuce.
You can sow them outdoors,
you can also sow them indoors.
I started by sowing them in modules
and when it warms up a bit
more towards late March
you can then transplant the modules straight into here.
I've also started spinach really early.
The rocket was a little bit later
and I've kept it indoors a bit more
due to, you know, potential frost problems.
It's absolutely amazing the amount of salads
we're getting from this small patch
and salads it's basically if there's one thing
that I would recommend you grow
in order to save money,
I'd recommend salad
because things like lettuce and mustard greens
the seeds are so cheap
and you get so much from it
and when you have such a huge amount of salad like this,
what we're doing every single night
we're having a main meal and then as a side
we're having salads and then we'll have little things
to go with the salads,
maybe halloumi cheese,
we might even have balsamic vinegar and olive oil.
So, one thing that we've done
is exactly four metres away
is the garden gate, the entrance gate
and we've got our salad beds literally the first thing
that you walk in,
so if you put something within easy reach and easy access,
then you're more likely to use it
but when you've got so much food right in front of you
like this which is, you know,
really easy to harvest,
and it's really actually amazingly tasty,
then it's almost a no-brainer to come up here
into the garden especially when the weather's like this
and to literally pick what you've grown and then eat it
and it's that connection where you've sown what you've grown
and then you're eating it
which is really, really rewarding
and when it comes to taste
you're also really rewarded with that.
So, during spring and summer
all I would say is every one or two weeks,
sow another row of lettuce and salad leaves
and then that will really will keep you going.
It's almost as simple as that.
And if you do have some kind of undercover growing
then you can start even earlier
because we were harvesting
for probably about three or four weeks salad in there,
in the solar tunnel before any of this
was ready to harvest.
In the video description I'm gonna list
some of the varieties that we're growing here
so you can see what we're growing
and literally remember, for a family of four,
this small area here is keeping us fed with salad.
I mean, my mum has salads as well for her lunches
so literally it's hardly anything.
It probably cost us in terms of cost of seed packets
two or three pounds at most for all of this.
So, just ensure that you sow the salads successionally
and you'll be in for an endless supply of salad
from late spring all the way through to autumn.