Grow your own salad: 10 ideas for planting lettuce and other greens

Greens comprise a range of vegetables grown for their leafy, dark green tops and each type has a distinctive flavour and texture. Here are a few tips for growing your own salads.

• Plant a mixture of collards, kale, broccoli rabe, and turnip and mustard greens.

To ensure a ready supply, plant a small bed or short row of the greens of your choice every 10 days in spring, then again in late summer or early fall.

Turn compost or rotted manure into the soil before planting kale or collards, which are heavy feeders.

• Add 0.5 to one kilogram of 10-10-10 fertilizer for every five square metres.
• Kale and collards prefer soil with a pH of 6.5 or above, so create acidic soil with lime, if needed.

• Feed greens when they are about 15 centimetres tall by spreading a band of 10-10-10 fertilizer at the rate of 250 grams (one cup) per three-metre row.
• Or douse them with a balanced, water-soluble fertilizer.

When grown in cool spring weather, baby mustard greens add a pleasant bite to salads.

• Be sure to keep plants well watered.
• Dry soil or hot weather makes mustard greens taste spicy and sometimes bitter. In early summer, pull up plants and compost them.

• Tender young greens can be stir-fried or steamed briefly before being served.

If you want to freeze them, you can steam them quickly in a covered container. Mature greens are tougher, so cook them longer to tenderize them and improve flavour.

• Lettuce prefers temperatures around 16°C to 18°C and turns bitter and bolts when days become long and hot.
• It needs full sun in cool weather but appreciates a little afternoon shade when days become warm.

• Lettuce needs constant moisture for good growth.

If too much water washes away nutrients, turning the leaves yellow, feed them with balanced water-soluble fertilizer.

• To keep rabbits and other creatures away, fence with chicken wire or use a scent repellent.
• Some gardeners swear by interplanting with marigolds.

• For head lettuces, cut plants at the base.
• With leaf lettuces you can pick the outer leaves when they are still young, which encourages inner ones to grow.

Keep your lettuce patch lively by including different types, which vary in size, colour and, most of all, texture.

• Butterhead or Boston lettuces form loose heads with soft, buttery leaves. Try 'Buttercrunch', 'Nancy,' 'Bibb' or 'Gem.' Butterheads mature in 60 to 75 days and often survive light frosts. Grown beneath a plastic tunnel, some will even survive winter.
• Crisphead varieties develop round or oblong heads with crisp, crunchy leaves. 'Iceberg' (60 days) is the best known, but French crisp varieties such as 'Nevada' or red-tinged 'Magenta' (50 days) grow faster and easier.
• Looseleaf lettuces quickly form spreading bunches of leaves, and new leaves keep coming as you pick the older ones. Baby leaf lettuce is ready in 30 days; plants are mature in 50 days.
• Romaine lettuce produces long, narrow leaves with crisp stems that form an upright head. It tolerates both heat and cold well. Miniature varieties mature in only 45 to 50 days. Full-size romaines need 60 days to form crisp heads.