Learn to Grow Salad: Listen to Chapter 3 of Leaves, Roots, and Fruit

Today I'm going to teach you how to grow your own salad at home. That's right. No more of that stinky stuff in that package that you put in your fridge and you let it sit at the back of the fridge for what, two weeks and then you toss it. No, no, we're not doing that anymore because I'm going to show you how to grow your own salad. And I am going to be reading from my book, Leaves, Roots and Fruit. Leaves, Roots and Fruit is a step by step gardening system. Starts with leaves, then goes to roots, then goes to fruit. Because easy est, easy, hard, okay? That's how these plants go, right? Super easy. A little bit harder, harder. So we're going to do the leaves first and I'm going to teach you by reading you from my book. I might add a little, you know, commentary here and there, but the first section of this book is all about leaves. So I start out with sprouts and microgreens. Then I do a whole chapter on herbs. And then we finish up the book by talk. Finish up the section by talking about leaves. So about salad. So I'm going to read you from chapter three of my book, all about growing salad greens. Okay? So get ready. Grab something delicious to drink or eat. Maybe you could even make yourself a salad. And I'm going to teach you how to grow your own. Okay, so let's get started. When I first started gardenary, I was far from being a gardening pro. I didn't have a degree in horticulture. I still don't. I hadn't even won yard of the month in my neighborhood. I declared myself a garden consultant even when I was a long way from knowing how to grow everything in the garden. And just between us, I still don't know everything. But before you call the garden police on me, let me explain. When I met with my first clients, I never, ever promised that I could teach them everything about gardening. I didn't have to. I filled our hour together by talking about the thing I did know how to do. My favorite aspect of gardening, setting up an organic salad garden. As a self taught gardener, I knew that learning everything at once wasn't possible or even enjoyable. Instead, the key to continuing to pick up the trowel season after season is gradually mastering one plant type at a time and and incorporating it into your everyday routine. I knew that if I could help someone quickly grow and harvest delicious salads every week for dinner for half of the year, they'd be on their way to becoming garden pros themselves. Spoiler alert my plan. It worked. This promise of six months of salad greens is no small thing. Picture that plastic box of spring mix that you pay six bucks for after it's been shipped across the country. Now compare that to a garden bed of sweet, crunchy and fresh lettuce greens that you can harvest right outside your back door. When you weigh the cost of store bought greens like fuel usage, single use, plastics waste, and the history of widespread E. Coli outbreaks and salmonella outbreaks, then against the benefits of homegrown vibrant flavor, nutritional content, and access to tasty varieties you'll never get at the grocery store. The garden beats the grocery in every way, though the grocery variety does have more frequent flyer miles. You've spoiled me. My client Reed, said. I cannot buy lettuce from the store anymore. It's either from my garden or I can't bring myself to eat it. I had to confess, that's exactly what I was hoping for, and I'm so glad that it happened. Getting hooked on something so good for you, so good for the planet, and so easy to grow is the best insurance that you'll never stop growing. If you're still not sure this gardening thing is for you, let me introduce you to salad gardening. Let's pretend it's you and me. During one of my first garden consults, I'll tell you how excited I am about my own lettuce garden and see if I cannot convince you to start growing your own greens too. Just don't be mad if you can't bring yourself to buy lettuce from the store anymore either. Let's talk about the plant families of the salad garden. Pop quiz time. You've got 10 seconds to name as many salad plants as you can. Iceberg 1. Romaine 2. Spinach 3. Cabbage 4. Have you thought of any others? If variety is the spice of life, it's clear why some people are not that excited about a salad. The truth is, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different plants that produce leaves perfect for tossing into bowls of fresh greens. It's not the plant's fault that our salad needs so much dressing to add a little bit of flavor. It's our food system. There are so many more greens worth eating that are stocked at the grocery store. You rarely see these other cultivars on the shelves because they don't ship well or hold up in storage. So before you dig in and grow your own salad greens, let's meet up with the varieties possible. Three key salad plant families are the most important to understand. The first is the aster plant family. You met this plant family in steps one and two, which include sunflowers, zinnia, marigold and, of course, aster. But the asters we welcome now are the ones that become delicious salad greens. Romaine, iceberg, spring mix, radicchio, butterhead and buttercrunch. These greens generally prefer the cool season, when temps range from just above freezing to 65 or 75 degrees Fahrenheit. The next plant family is the dark greens, the brassicaei family, or the mustard family. These salad greens are darker in color than the asters, and they vary in size from small arugula leaves to kale that can grow more than 5ft in height. The key brassicas in the salad garden include arugula, radishes grown for their greens, kale, collards, mustards and cabbage. These greens prefer the cool season. Brassica plants are frost tolerant, if not frost resistant, meaning they can be planted as soon as the soil can be worked in spring, and will even grow under frost cloth or a cold frame deep into winter. Some brassicas, mostly arugula and kale, can continue growing when the weather warms up past 75 degrees. Kale and collards are biennial plants, so they actually make it through two years in the garden if the conditions are optimal. You met the amaranth family in steps one, but now we grow these family members to their full size. Remember, step one is microgreens, so we grew Swiss chard and spinach and beets as microgreens, but now we're growing them to full salad leaves. Amaranth favorites for the salad bowl include spinach, Swiss chard and beets. These greens are packed with antioxidants and vitamins, and they also love the cool season. Swiss chard is a biennial and can last for years in the kitchen garden. If you were to grow only these three plant families in your salad garden, you'd still have way more variety in your salad bowl than you thought possible. Asters, brassicas and amaranths together produce the majority of the green leaves you can harvest for just picked salads from the garden for much of the year, if not year round, since each family includes plants that can withstand frost and some that can survive summer's hottest temperatures. So after you master the plants in these plant families, you can expand to less well known plant families, especially when you're ready to grow into the heat of the summer. For warmer times of the year, you can try nasturtiums, a peppery green that produces beautiful edible flowers and flourishes in the Warm season. And New Zealand spinach, a heat loving salad green that's actually not spinach at all, but still packs the same nutrients. And another spinach called Malabar spinach. This is a climbing plant and Malabar spinach is a nutrient dense green that thrives in the summer heat for cool season gardening. Another plant family includes sorrel, which has a tangy, citrusy leaf. Alright, now that we talked about the plant families, let's talk about the setup for a salad garden. When it comes to spacing your plants, salad greens might be the most forgiving of all in the garden. If you give them a foot, they'll grow to be a huge lettuce plant. If you give them an inch, they'll grow as much as they're able to within that little piece of earth. In a sense, lettuce leaves it up to you. Get it? The space you should allot to salad greens really depends on A the output you're hoping to achieve and B whether you'd like to cut a couple of leaves from each plant at a time or harvest an entire head of greens all at once. If you're aiming for small leaf harvests, plant the seeds closer together, with as many as 9 to 12 seeds per square foot for smaller greens, or at least one to four seeds per square foot for larger ones. Leafy greens that produce lots of small harvestable leaves, even when given minimal space, include spring mixes, buttercrunch and endive in the aster family, arugula and radish greens in the brassica family, and spinach and beet greens in the amaranth family. Each of these can thrive with only a few square inches in which to grow, and many of them taste best when harvested 3 to 4 inches in length. So be aware that tight spacing assumes you're going to be harvesting often. Because you're going to be harvesting often, right? If you'd prefer to harvest leaves or an entire head of cabbage or romaine at a time, give plants more space to reach maturity. Larger plants include romaine, iceberg lettuces and radicchio in the aster family, kale, mustards and cabbages in the brassica family, and Swiss chard in the amaranth family, though all can actually be grown for longer than 45 to 65 days. These plants will grow leaves that are at least 10 to 12 inches long, with the plants themselves extending as wide as one square foot each. So plant these larger plants as many as four per square feet or as little as one per square foot. I messed that up. But what I was trying to say is they'll grow to be little. You can harvest them as little leaves, but if you give them more room in the garden, then they'll grow big leaves for you. Right? So give them an inch, they'll take an inch. Give them a square foot, and they'll take that space, too. Some greens are going to be best planted by seed right into the soil. This is true for all those tiny leafy greens. So their root systems are really shallow, and it makes it challenging to transplant them without shocking the plant and hindering the growth. Most leafy green seeds, from spinach to spring mix to arugula. They don't need to be planted too deeply, so they're very small, and they enjoy just a bit of sunlight as they germinate. All you need to do is measure out the seed planting distance, place the seeds on the surface of the soil, and then barely cover the seeds with a little bit of compost. Larger plants, those that will grow for months, are ideally started in advance indoors or purchased as transplants. This is going to be cabbage and mustards and kales in the brassica family, Swiss chard in the amaranth family, and then iceberg and romaine in the aster family. Start these in a mix of coco coir and compost or organic seed starting mix indoors, undergrow lights, and then you're going to transplant them to the garden to give them one to four plants per square feet. All right, that's the space. Now let's talk about the sun. As gardeners with close neighbors, my husband and I have done our share of hunting for more sunlight to shine on our garden every place we've lived. You might even say we've been a little desperate to find it. Jason jumped a fence in Nashville to chop down some wild trees so we could receive a few extra hours of sunlight on our first garden. Don't worry, no one lived on the other side of that fence. Okay? Don't tell anyone. We shook our heads in disappointment in Houston when we realized that our garden would be in the shadow of our neighbor's oak tree all winter. And don't worry, we didn't cut that one down. In Chicago, our neighbor's home just to the south of us blocked summer sunlight from reaching our kitchen garden in the cooler months of the year. So unless you're growing in an empty lot or on a treeless prairie, chances are you're going to be fighting for sunlight in your own garden space, too. I can relate. The good news is you don't have to struggle nearly as much when you're growing on step number three. In fact, it's because of our frustrations with too much shade that that I learned the resilience of salad greens. When the gardening books say find a spot that receives eight hours of sunlight, they're speaking in ideals and also assuming that you're going to be growing all sorts of vegetables in that space, including fruiting plants like tomatoes and cucumbers. Too many, you included, would be Gardeners call it quits when they hear this instruction, and they assume that their yard doesn't have enough light or any kind of productive gardening. They're not entirely wrong. Sunlight is the central ingredient for a successful garden. But just because your yard isn't basking in eight or more hours of direct sun doesn't mean you have to close the book on your garden journey. A kitchen garden can still work for you, thanks to leafy greens. With just four hours of sunlight a day, leafy greens produce roots and their first set of leaves. And most lettuce plants will grow to their full potential while receiving less than five or six hours of sun a day. It may be true that more hours of sunlight at the right time of year, with the right temperatures, will give you more leaves, bigger plants, and more production. But you'll find that if you plant enough, you can gather plenty of salad greens from a bed that receives just a few hours of light daily. So leave the fight for more sun for your fruiting plants. More on that in steps six and seven. And for now, find a spot that receives at least four hours of sunlight a day. Plant your greens there and fill one harvest basket after another with delicious salad greens, even if you're standing in the shade with your scissors. All right, so that's the space and the sun. Now let's talk about the season. For the most part, salad plants thrive in the cooler temps of the year. In fact, ideal growing temperatures for the three key plant families range from 45 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning salad greens grow best in spring and fall, or even in the winter for some gardeners. That's not to say that these greens grow only in the cool season. With a little help from you, they can continue through the cold and through the heat. In cold weather, greens grow under the COVID of frost cloth for protection from light frost, and they'll hold up until temperatures go below 25 degrees. If you really want your greens to push through winter, you can grow them under glass, under a small cloche, in a cold frame, or inside a greenhouse where Most greens stay alive and are harvestable even when outside temps sink as low as the teens in hot weather. You can extend the life of your cool, wither loving salad plants by keeping their roots well watered each day and by covering the plants with shade cloth or a wicker cloche. Providing shade can delay bolting, going to flower and seed by at least a few weeks and possibly the whole season. Of course, the best way to push into either the coldest or the hottest parts of the year with salad greens is to grow the varieties that are more tolerant or resistant to the temperature swings. For extreme cold, grow greens with a savoy or bumpy texture. Brassicas like kale and especially cabbage have savoy varieties to push into the hotter months. You're going to grow greens that love the heat, like Malabar spinach, New Zealand spinach, nasturtiums and mustards. One final way to extend your salad garden season is by focusing on biennial plants like kale and collards from the brassica family and Swiss chard from the amaranth family. These plants do not produce seed until their second full growing year. Biennial plants need to survive as long as possible so they make it to their seed producing year, which means they'll work hard to keep growing through the hottest days. Planting biennials means more greens for you, possibly year round. Let's talk about caring for a salad garden first. The water One of my favorite concepts in the garden is to think about nature. I introduced that in my first book, Kitchen Garden Revival, because gardening adventures often begin at the big box store these days it's easy to forget that nature has all the answers we need when it comes to plant care and growth. Anytime I feel confused, frustrated, or downright overwhelmed in the garden, I just come back to this question. How does this grow in nature? The answer is almost always the solution I'm looking for and the logic I need to keep me growing. Our kitchen gardens may be made with our own hands, but the main goal is to imitate what happens in the wild. Our best work as gardeners is simply imitating nature as clothes closely as possible. Consider the life cycle of a butter crunch plant. After growing lots of leaves, it finally produces a bolted stalk with flowers that bloom. Those flowers dry, each one containing hundreds of tiny seeds, and with the first big rainstorm of autumn, all those seeds drop to the ground. The plant's withered leaves and stalk crumble under the weight of the first snow and freeze in place over the dark months of winter. As the days lengthen in early spring, sunlight hits the soil once more and the snow begins to melt. Yay. Each day, another layer of snow turns to water until all we see is dark, wet earth. What we can't see are the lettuce seeds, the ones that fell onto the soil, where they continue their long winter nap. Day after day, the seeds absorb the sun's warmth, the light overhead and the rain and the snow melt. Finally, full to the brim of cool water and warm soil, the tiny seeds burst right open. It's easy to assume that the first green sprout came up because of the sunshine. Yes, light was definitely part of the equation. However, the thing that was most consistent for those seeds was water. That slow snow melt provided consistent moisture for the seeds until they simply had to burst open and sprout. And that's the picture to keep in mind when you're watering your lettuce greens. Most lettuce plants are 90 to 95% water. So to successfully grow lettuce greens, watering has to be one of your major focuses. More important than the frequency of watering is the consistency. So there's one word to remember when it comes to your salad greens watering plants. Consistency. Sorry, I said consistency. Too soon. Let's do that again. More important than the amount of water is the frequency of watering. So there's one word to remember, and that's consistency. That's better, right? If you're growing lettuce greens, you've now got a new habit to add to your gardening routine, and that's checking the moisture level of your salad plants. The most crucial time for consistent watering is before the seeds germinate. Think about nature here and just picture that melting snow. Don't let the soil dry out one bit before the seeds show their first signs of green. Once the seeds are established, continue to keep the plants well watered. Lettuce plants have shallow roots that grow right under the soil surface, putting them at risk of drying out sooner than the more deeply planted seeds. So water lettuce seedlings consistently, maintaining a moist soil environment and being certain that the water hits the roots of the plants, not the leaves. As lettuce plants grow, their leaves will tell you when to water and when to pause. If leaves begin to wilt, that's a sign you should have watered about two days ago. You'll have to baby the greens back to life over the next few days. If leaves turn yellow, you water too much. And if leaves show signs of mold or mildew or the stem starts to rot, you're watering way too much. Let nature be your guide when it comes to watering your salad Plants remember the slow snow melt. Give them a little water, not too much, and keep it consistent. Follow these rules and you're 98% of the way there. Nutrients the good news about growing salad greens is that they only reach the third stage of their maturity before we harvest and enjoy them. That's because leaves are the only thing that we want from these plants. This means good news, less work for you and faster harvests. If you set up your leafy green plants to grow in rich compost amended soil, they're not going to require additional fertilizing. Compost rich soil provides the key nutrients, namely nitrogen and magnesium salad greens need to thrive. That said, if you want to boost leafy green production, encouraging the plants to grow bigger and maybe faster, or if the leaves lose their bright green hue, you can fertilize every two to four weeks to add a bit of nitrogen to the plant's system. But be careful. Think about nature and use only organic ingredients like cottonseed meal, earthworm castings, or just a little bit of extra compost. If you use a synthetically derived fertilizer, you're going to risk burning the leaves. Don't use a synthetically derived fertilizer, okay? Listen to your plants. They're going to tell you when they need a little something extra. And I have a guide in here on page 105 to show you about fertilizers. All right? Tending the Caterpillars it was my third year of growing salad greens, so I obviously knew everything on the subject, and I had just conceived a plan to sell homegrown salad greens to my neighbors. I told a few local businesses and neighbors I'd be delivering just harvested lettuce greens from my garden every day. For lunch. Jason offered his muscle to support my garden business idea, and we turned three 1 foot tall beds into six 6 inch tall beds and covered them all with lettuce seeds. As expected, within about 30 days, I started to harvest the first leafy greens from my new boxes. And I did a test run of washing, sorting and packaging the greens before I was ready to sell. But what I found in the kitchen sink was something no one would buy, a bunch of wriggly caterpillars. These were cabbage loopers, little green critters that munch on leaves at will in their early caterpillar stages from chrysalises and then emerge as white moths, each female capable of laying hundreds of new caterpillar eggs in a matter of days. The fact that I was discovering caterpillars at this stage could only mean that there were likely hundreds more in the future. Product Ugh was the best thing I could think to say. I knew I could treat the caterpillars organically, but I immediately regretted not protecting my salad plants in the first place. They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but you'll actually need a few yards for pest protection in the salad garden. Yards of tulle or garden mesh, that is. So take it from me, in my caterpillar infested garden, put most of your tending efforts into protecting your greens from pests and disease, rather than treating the problems once they arise. The best way to do this in the salad garden is with covers. Tulle or mesh fabric offers the perfect protection for salad greens. The tiny holes in the fabric are big enough to allow sunlight, water and air to reach the plants, yet small enough to keep out the moths, the slugs and the beetles, leafhoppers and caterpillars. Simply covering greens with hoops and a piece of agricultural mesh fabric or tulle can prevent all kinds of critters from entering your bed, saving all the beautiful greens for you to enjoy, not the pests Protecting your leafy greens will spare you a lot of grief, but you've got to time it right. As soon as you plant the seeds or starter plants outside, cover them. Waiting a few days or weeks, especially after the first leaves appear, can mean you'll end up trapping the pests inside the garden instead of keeping them out. Once your greens are protected with a cover, you just lift the mesh when you need to tend or harvest the plants, and then just reapply and secure the COVID again till next time. If I mean when pests do arrive on salad garden plants, there are ways you can treat them organically. The first is to remove all the damaged leaves. Be ruthless, clean the soil around the plant, and over the next two weeks continue plucking off damaged leaves and picking up dead plant material and weeds from the soil. If severe cutting and cleaning don't rid the plants of the pest, you can apply a spray or granular treatment. My favorites for the salad garden are garlic barrier, an extract of garlic mixed with water and sprayed on plants, or diluted castile soap. In extreme pest infestations, you could use Monterey bt, but if the pest issue is that severe, I typically just remove the affected plants, clean the area, and just start over. Beyond protecting the garden, your most important tending task is harvesting. By harvesting lettuce greens, you're actually tending them. When you remove the oldest and lowest leaves from each plant, you make sure the soil is clear of leaf debris and encourage new growth from the center of each plant. Just as in step two, tending and harvesting are pretty much the same thing. If that's not a gardener's win, I don't know what is. Beyond harvesting to eat regularly cut the older and outer leaves from the plants, even if they don't look fit for consumption because of holes or spots or other damage. Generally, I toss these leaves into the compost pile, but if there's signs of disease, I'll put them in a separate space for green waste. Those caterpillars might have gnawed their way through my first business idea, but they ultimately taught me important lessons in tending my salad garden. A little mesh and regular harvesting go a very long way. Now it's harvest time. Though the wait to harvest salad leaves is longer than that for sprouts and microgreens, I'd still call salad gardening fast food. Baby greens like radish leaves and arugula are ready to harvest in less than 30 days, and most other salad greens will be ready to cut after 45 days. That's under six weekends between your planting day and your first harvest day. And once you hold a lettuce, kale or arugula seed in your hand, you're not going to be able to look at a head of lettuce or plastic tub of arugula the same way again. All this can come from just that in such a short time. It is an everyday miracle that most of us take for granted when browsing the grocery store refrigerated section. But not you. Not after you complete your first few weeks of salad gardening. From now on, romaine is remarkable. Kale is unbelievable. And yes, even spinach is a wonder. As soon as you plant your lettuce seeds, mark your calendar 45 days forward with a star that reads first harvest of the best salad I've ever tasted in my entire life. I have a little section in each chapter called Work with Nature, and I'm going to read that to you because this one's important. Salad greens play well with other plants in the garden, and plants will stay healthier when you work with nature, plant chives, green onions, garlic and onions around your greens as a natural pest deterrent. Pests smell the onions but not the leafy greens. Grow edible flowers like calendula and nasturtium as trap crops, plants that attract pests to their flowers and scent, enticing the pests away from the salad greens. Grow herbs in the apaci family near salad greens to welcome beneficial insects like ladybugs to the salad garden. These insects will prey on lettuces predators like aphids, and will work alongside you to keep your lettuce for you, not the bugs. Finally, plant greens alongside nitrogen fixing fruit plants like peas and beans that absorb nitrogen from soil bacteria and can share that growth, spurring nitrogen with salad greens so they grow strong. You can also plant salad greens in the shade of taller fruiting plants like tomatoes or cucumbers to keep the greens cool when the temperatures warm up. As soon as our first salad gardens started growing, my family couldn't shove the greens in our mouth fast enough. So I did what any smart mother who desperately needs help from friends and neighbors would do. I shared the bounty. Actually, it was these garden barters that first got me thinking about starting a garden business. This was before I spotted the caterpillars. Caterpillars. That's kind of a hard word to say, don't you think? Caterpillars. You'll see exactly what I mean in terms of full harvest baskets once your lettuce plants begin showing leaves. Follow these steps and you just might find yourself equipped with new bribing power for puppy walking or kid watching too. One of the reasons leaves are so much fun to grow is because they grow so much. You can get pounds of lettuce from just one plant in a very short period of time. In fact, I expect to get at least one salad bowl full per month from each plant. So if I've planted nine salad plants in a square foot, I'm going to get nine small bowls of lettuce within a 45 to 75 day period from just that one spot. If I'm growing bigger leaves from head lettuces like cabbage and iceberg, I'm going to get one huge harvest that could feed all of us from one square foot after 60 days. And if it's a large cut and come again plant like kale, I'm going to harvest weekly from that one square foot of space for at least three to six months, if not longer. It's good to think forward to harvest time when planning and planting your salad greens. Before sowing any seeds, estimate the number of green servings you'd love to have for your household per month. Remember, this isn't just for raw salad. I use greens in the morning smoothies and dips and side dishes and stir fries and sauteed meals too. So I usually estimate a little under two servings a day for myself and my husband and one serving every day for my kids. One can hope this adds up to about 150 green servings per month for our household. So when I divide that up by four or five plants per square foot, I know I need about 30 square feet of gardening space to grow enough salad for my family every single month. Once your plants get started, it can be hard to keep up with everything that's coming out of the garden. Harvest one leaf and another one's already growing to replace it. The majority of plants from the aster and some from the brassica and amaranth family will produce new and delicious leaves for 60 to 90 days if the temps stay below 80 degrees Fahrenheit. When temps get higher, it'll be time to either let these plants bolt and produce seed or just remove them from the garden altogether. Biennial plants like Swiss chard and kale provide new leaves and servings for months to come. As soon as you pull the cool season greens, you can plant some warm season greens to give you harvest. Instead. They'll provide another 45 to 75 days of harvest before it's time to return to cool season greens once more. If you've got a hot season in your climate, fill it with hot, tolerant greens like Malabar spinach, sorrel and longevity spinach too. Taking this Step Once you take this step, you'll soon enjoy the most delicious salad greens you have ever tasted. They don't just taste good, they are so good for you. And these freshly harvested leaves contain more nutrition than any salad green you can purchase. And they're not just good for you, they're good for the planet, too. With every bite of homegrown salad, you're cutting down on food miles and single use plastics. And let's not forget the food waste that you're avoiding in between salads and green smoothies. Your greens aren't turning slimy in the fridge, they're still growing in your garden, staying healthy and fresh until you're ready to consume another harvest. Instead of facing spoiled plastic boxes of lettuce, you're spoiling yourself with salad you actually like to eat. Consider yourself warned. Once you've tasted homegrown greens, it will be hard to go back to the grocery store variety. So don't be mad at me if it's garden greens for you or none at all. After you take this step and then I have a little growing six Months of Salad Greens tutorial Basically, select a site, prepare a raised bed, add sandy loam soil, provide a consistent water source, and then plant your seeds in cool season temps. Plant by seed or carefully transplant small plants Keep well watered until your seeds pop up and then cover with mesh or tool. Add nutrients when needed and water consistently. Cut the outer and lower leaves often. Harvest weekly. After 45 days, remove the plant once it bolts and then start all over again. And that, my friend, that's how to grow your own salad garden from my book Leaves, Roots and Fruit. This is just step three of an eight step system where I teach you how to go from black thumb to green thumb. But listen, if you just do step three, oh my goodness, can you imagine how different your diet would be, how different your health will be, how different your grocery bill will be? When I first started doing this, I planted the salad garden in October when we lived in Houston. And I'm not exaggerating to say I harvested a salad a day and I did not buy greens from October until April of the following spring. It is that abundant and prolific and that easy. I did that just right alongside my driveway and a couple of simple raised beds. So if I could do this, caterpillars included, you can do this too. Salad gardening is a huge passion of mine and it's something that I truly believe every single person can do. If you're in an apartment, a townhome, a high rise, or if you've got sprawling land, each of us should be able to grow enough grains to produce salad for at least six months out of the year. So challenge is on. Are you taking it? Are you accepting this challenge? I want you to commit to trying to grow six months of salad alongside me this year. You can pick up my book wherever books are sold. I'll put a link below our video or on the podcast notes so you can get leaves, roots and fruit to learn the other steps. But you got all of it all Chapter three right here today, so no more excuses. You can grow your own salad and I'll be growing my own right alongside you too. Thanks so much for being part of the Grow youw Self podcast and making the garden ordinary with me here at Gardenary. I would love it if you would come and say hello, tag us on Instagram, show us that you are listening to the podcast, and please leave a review. Your reviews help other people know whether or not this show is worth a listen. I cannot wait to help you grow in your own garden. And I've got an awesome resource called the Gardenary Calendar that you can download for free. If you go to gardenary.com calendar, you can download that calendar right away, put in two of your dates and we'll tell you all the other dates you need to know for your garden year, including when to plant all those salad greens. So go to gardenary.com calendar and I'll get that calendar for you right away. It's customizable. You get to make your own copy. It's awesome and you need it, and you're going to use it when you grow all that salad. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time on the Grow youw Self podcast. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere. You love getting your podcast delivered on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, iHeartRadio, you name it, we are there for you. And if you want to read the notes and get our free resources to help you grow more, you can go to gardenary.com podcast.