One of the easiest crops to grow is salad leaves, just imagen eating delicious crispy, frilly, green, and red salad leaves that give you different flavours such as spicy, peppery, or plain. But from your garden rather than from a plastic packet in the shops.

Salad leaves are a quick growing crop, usually only taking about 6 weeks to mature. And if you sow successive sowings you can have salad leaves all summer.

You can either sow salad leaves in row outside – they will grow in most garden soil, but you can dig in organic matter. Or you can add chicken manure fertilizer and dig it in before sowing your seeds.

To sow make a row with a hoe and sow the seeds thinly and cover with soil – than water.

Alternatively, you can grow salad leaves in pots, containers or some people even grow it in old guttering, fill it with compost and water, then scatter the seeds thinly in the pot, cover with a thin layer of compost.

You can start sowing salad leaves from about late March until September, you can grow till October if you cover the leaves with fleece.

It’s important not to let the soil or compost dry out. This is very important if the weather is hot. If possible you can much around the plants, which will help retain water in the soil or compost.

How to harvest salad leaves

When the salad leaves are large enough to handle start picking the leaves, just snip the stem with a sharp pair of scissors. Because salad leaves are – cut-and-come-again – you can just pick a few leaves from each plant and they will start growing again  Once the leaves start producing flower heads you need to pull the plants up as they become bitter tasting. Just put these plants on your compost heap.

Salad leaves problems

Slugs and snails are the main pests of salad leaves, best way to control them is by setting out beer traps or putting out natural slug pellets that don’t have natural.