Growing Our Own Salad

I have been reading Gorgeously Green by Sophie Uliano and am really enjoying the book.   Her main point is to change things a little at a time.  She never says to throw everything away in your house and completely start life over, instead she encourages you to buy one thing that is organic when you go to the store or change one thing about the way that you live.  Her steps are gradual and easy to do.  Or in other words… my kind of green!

Although we have already made a few changes we still have a long way to go to become Gorgeously Green.  Perhaps my favorite change so far is our decision to grow our own salad greens.

I hadn’t even thought about growing salad greens when we were making plans for our garden, so needless to say there isn’t any room in there to grow anything else.  Sophie recommended growing salad greens in a wine barrel planter and I thought that would be a great idea.  Since the greens don’t enjoy too much direct, hot sunlight we placed the planter on our porch so that it would get some morning sun and would be protected from the late evening sun.

I bought two packages of Mesclun salad greens and scattered the seeds on top of the organic potting soil and then covered the seeds with about 1/4 inch of soil.  If you are going to try this remember that greens like a lot of water, so make sure to keep them moist, not soaking, but moist.  Mesclun will grow well into the fall here in West Texas and if well tended to you can expect around 3 different harvests.  That will provide some good salad for most of the year.

Here is our Mesclun all planted.  I can’t wait until the greens start to show.  Not only will it be some great salad it will really add some life to our porch.  Oh… and did I mention the barrel still smelled like wine??  It took ten minutes to get James away from licking it.  He has a problem I think.