Grow Your Own Salad Leaves With This Foolproof 5 Step Process From Emily Cupit
Elizabeth is a Permaculture Garden Designer, Sustainability Consultant and Professional Writer, working as an advocate for positive change. She graduated from the University of St. Andrews with an MA in English and Philosophy and obtained a Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design from the Permaculture Association.
Reviewed By PETER LICKORISH
Peter is a Horticulture Lecturer and self-employed Horticulturist, with a passion for diverse areas of the industry - from garden design to the science behind plant growth and propagation. He has completed the Royal Horticultural Society’s Master of Horticulture (MHort) Award and lectures on RHS courses at Bedford College.
Contributions From EMILY CUPIT
Emily is a Gardening Writer, Photographer and Videographer from Derbyshire, UK. She is the Founder of Emily's Green Diary - a community of more than 75,000 people who share in her gardening journey.
Joe Harrison is a Garden Writer & Content Creator who is also known as 'Grow With Joe' across his social platforms. Joe is best known for his focus on edible gardening in his allotment and the tips he shares to help involve more children in horticulture. He is also the co-founder of the online community The Tomato Club.
IN THIS GUIDE
Being able to eat freshly grown salad that you have grown yourself at home is a wonderful thing.
Even if you have never grown any of your own food before, you should find this a relatively easy process and you might be able to harvest fresh leaves in as little as a month or so.
“Growing your own green goodies from seed is so fun and rewarding,” shares Joe Harrison, Garden Blogger & Horticulturist.
“The excitement (and sometimes relief!), you feel when the first signs of life appear never leaves you, no matter how many seeds you sow over the years.”
To grow your own salad leaves from seed:
- Prepare seed trays or small pots filled with a peat-free multipurpose compost or homemade equivalent.
- Scatter the salad leaf seeds and cover them with soil.
- Water in the seeds and wait for germination to take place.
- Prick out the salad leaf seedlings or thin them out.
- Harvest your salad leaves.
Read on to learn more about each of these steps.
| Difficulty | Easy |
| Equipment Required | Seeds, seed trays or pots, watering can, gardening scissors |
| When To Sow | All year (indoors) or March to September (outdoors) |
When To Sow
For outdoor cultivation, salad leaves can be sown any time between March and September, but if you provide the right care, you could be sowing and growing salad leaves indoors or under cover all year round.
Varieties To Sow
There are a wide variety of plants that can be grown to provide leaves for salads, including some perennial plants and even some trees!
Here are some of the most commonly grown options to use as salad leaves to consider:
1) Prepare The Growing Area
Prepare seed trays or small pots and fill them with peat-free multipurpose compost or a homemade equivalent if you are growing salad leaves in containers.
Consolidate this well to prevent it sinking later.
Alternatively, consider sowing seeds in spring or summer where they are to grow in the ground to fill gaps in your vegetable garden or to serve as companion crops.
2) Sow Seeds
Scatter the seeds thinly over the growing medium or soil and then cover them with a thin layer of compost, approximately 1cm deep.
A sieve or riddle is useful for making sure only fine material covers the seed.
“I find that for most salad crops, the simplest and most productive way of growing is to treat them as cut-and-come-again crops,” shares Master Horticulturist Peter Lickorish.
“This way, seeds can be sown fairly densely, and leaves harvested sporadically as needed.
“If a seed packet contains 100 seeds, I would let that cover a 1.5m² to give good spacing, as a guide.”
3) Wait For Germination
Make sure that the growing medium or soil is moist, but take care not to overwater, making sure that there is adequate drainage.
Sow outdoors in full sun, or, when sowing indoors, place the seeds in a light, bright location.
Seeds should germinate relatively quickly.
“With the right growing conditions, the average amount of time a gardener will have to wait to see signs of life is around 7-14 days,” Joe says.
“However, this can vary depending on the vegetable variety which has been grown and germination can be much quicker or much longer.”
4) Thin Out Seedlings
If the seedlings seem crowded, you can thin them out if you wish.
You can also prick out some options to grow them into fuller and larger plants, but when growing for salad leaves, you typically don’t need to do so.
5) Harvest Your Leaves
Once the plants are around 10cm tall, you can use a pair of scissors to cut them all off and use the leaves in a salad.
This stage can be reached in as little as 4-6 weeks, depending on which types you have chosen and where they are grown.
New leaves will grow to replace those you have taken in a couple of weeks and you should get 3-4 batches of leaves from just one sowing.
“My best advice is to just go for it – the worst that can happen is your seeds don’t germinate,” says Joe.
“The best that can happen is you get rewarded with lots and lots of tiny greens which you can nurture and enjoy all season.”
