Grow your own salad greens
Lettuce and rocket are easy to grow in any garden, so much so that you can easy grow your own green salad. No space in the garden? No problem! You can easily grow lettuce and rocket in pots. In fact, you can even grow your salad greens in the kitchen.
The crispy freshness of lettuce combined with the nutty spice of rocket are a perfect combination for green salad. Serve with a little olive oil, balsamic vinegar and parmesan shavings or thin slivers of mozarella. While lettuce and rocket like plenty of sunlight, our hot summers may also result in the tips of the leaves looking burnt [tip burn], so it's best to plant in a lightly shaded site - mine crop is planted underneath a shady palm tree!
All you need to grow your own lettuce or rocket is a free draining, humus rich soil that will hold plenty of moisture in the summer. In garden beds, dig over the soil and add plenty of compost to prepare for planting. In pots you will need to place some broken ceramic, small pebbles or other draining material at the bottom of the pot before adding the soil.
Lightly rake the bed, or use a fork to scrap the top of your potted soil and then carefully sprinkle over the seeds. In a pot diameter of 20cm you will only be able to have one lettuce, but with Butter Lettuce or Rocket that's fine as you're only going to remove fresh leaves as you need them.
Water the plants regularly with a light watering every evening. Both lettuce and rocket prefer a slightly damp - not wet - soil for optimum foliage growth.
To avoid having a glut of lettuce and to ensure that crops are regularly coming into harvest, make successive, smaller sowings of lettuce seeds, at 1 or 2 week intervals. Once the lettuce seedlings get to about 10 centimetres high they can be thinned out to leave a gap of about 20 centimetres between each plant - depending on the overall size of the variety grown. If you are planning on transplanting seedlings grown indoors into open ground then this is an ideal time to do this.