Want the Best Salads? Grow Them Yourself!

Freshly harvested Mizuna, parsley and basil

Salad is a weird word. Look at it.

Admittedly I have been looking at the word ‘salad’ for the last 30 minutes which may contribute to the fact that it seems to have lost all meaning. At this point if you told me ‘salad’ was the name for a kind of ancient Middle Eastern headdress worn only by royals and religious leaders I would totally believe you.

Anyway, it’s not a kind of ancient Middle Eastern headdress. In fact, the word ‘salad’ has Latin roots; it originated as ‘herba salata’ (or ‘salted greens’); a name thought to refer to the ancient Roman pastime of dunking lettuce in salt for added flavour. And while I’m certainly a fan of chucking salt onto pretty much everything, the subsequent additions of vinegar and olive oil definitely upgraded the whole ‘salad’ experience.

Nowadays the term ‘salad’ is as loose-fitting and generous as a Shar Pei’s skin. Let a bowl of pasta cool to room temperature and - hey presto! - it’s a salad! Take some fried bacon, mayonnaise, crispy croutons, eggs and anchovies, toss them together and throw a handful of romaine lettuce on top and - bam! - it’s a Caesar! A quick tour of google reveals such travesties (or brilliance?) as ‘pizza salads’, ‘Big Mac salads’, ‘jell-o salads’ and ‘marshmallow salads’. I think perhaps the modern salad is simply anything that fits in a big bowl and pretends to be healthier than it is.

Anyhoo. The ancients were onto a good thing and even as late as the 14th century salads were still modest assortments of sensible ingredients, among them lettuces, parsley, watercress, borage, sage, mint, fennel, chives, onions, leeks and purslane. Sound familiar? How many of these have you got growing in your garden at the moment?

The happy truth of the matter is that if you want to create the kind of salad that actually deserves the title ‘salted leaves’, you’re in luck: you can fill your backyard with ingredients to make your own leafy bowls of deliciousness all year round!

Harvesting fresh salad greens from the garden

Why grow your own salads?

So maybe they’re not as instagrammable as a bright red tomato or a giant zucchini (both of which you could totally throw into your salads by the way) but in my honest opinion if you’re thinking about starting an edible garden, leafy greens and herbs are the number one first step.

Leafy greens and herbs give you bang for your buck. They’re the kitchen essentials, the infinitely re-workable, stalwart vegetables that will be there for you all year round and ask very little in return. They’re pretty resistant to nibbling critters and don’t take up much space. They can easily be grown in pots and are the best kind of vegetable to grow if you want to reduce your packaging and plastic waste (the packaging used for herbs and pre-washed lettuce is insane!!). To top it off, they’re one of those veggies that, when eaten fresh, is incomparable to the shop-bought variety.

Grow your own leafy greens and herbs and, while everyone else is out picking through sad, limp leaves in supermarket lettuce bins and staring down plastic packets of sludge-ifying coriander, you’ll be skipping through your own homegrown meadows of kale, silverbeet, sorrel and sage, without a care in the world and feeling smug as all hell. Convinced? Good. Here’s how to do it.

Silverbeet growing in the kitchen garden beds

How to grow your own salads and herbs at home

Leafy greens and herbs are some of the easiest things to grow in the garden. Herbs are largely resistant to bugs (who tend not to like the highly fragrant leaves) and most salad leaves are fast growing and thrive easily. The only tricky part is making sure you always have stuff on hand to pick and avoiding those lulls in produce that send you back to the supermarket. To help with that, I’ve broken the last sections of this post down by seasons, so you can work out what to grow in your garden (and when) for year-round salad greens.

How to grow salad leaves

‘Salad leaves’ is a pretty vague term for a whole load of different leafy vegetables. To start with, let’s go through just a few of the different kinds of greens you could be adding to your salad. There are lettuces, mustard greens, cress, rocket, kale, silverbeet, spinach and purslane. There’s perennial spinach, sorrel, chicory and kang kong (I grow this in our pond!). You can also eat nasturtium leaves, fennel leaves, beetroot leaves, baby broccoli leaves, sweet potato leaves (but NOT potato leaves - those aren't safe to eat), carrot tops, radish leaves, broad bean leaves and pea shoots.

And that barely scrapes the surface because within many of those categories there is a wide variety of exciting things to try growing (for instance there are heaps of delicious varieties of lettuce and mustard greens - work your way through as many as you can!).

Growing salad leaves: containers vs in the ground

Salad greens like lettuce, cress, rocket and sorrel have fairly shallow root systems and so will grow happily in containers or direct in your garden beds - the choice is up to you. The most important thing is the quality of the soil. Salad greens like rich, moisture-retentive soil, so make sure you’ve given your soil a good boost before you start planting (have a read of this blog post to learn how to improve your soil before planting).

Growing salad leaves: sunshine and water

Many salad greens have delicate, paper-thin leaves, which means they don’t hold onto a lot of moisture and can wilt and die easily on hot days if they’re planted in dry soil or in the baking hot sun. This is especially true for things like lettuces, mustard greens, silverbeet, rocket, cress and sorrel.

Lettuces and mustard greens in particular do better as a cool weather crop, although you can grow them through summer as long as they’re grown in partial shade. If you’re growing these greens in summer, find them a spot where they’ll be protected from the afternoon sun (they’d be happy in dappled shade too) and mulch well around them to help lock water into the soil. Don’t worry too much if they look a bit wilt-y in the midday sun, just give them a good drink of water and they’ll perk up by evening. In winter, these plants will do best in full sun.

Rocket, sorrel, cress and silverbeet seeds can be sown in spring for a summer crop and will fare better in the heat than most lettuces. Plants like kale, fennel, beetroot, radishes and broccoli have sturdier leaves and more resilient root systems, making them a bit more hardy in hot weather. They can go in full sun in summer, but make sure your soil is rich and moist and that they’re well watered.

Growing salad leaves: indoors vs outdoors

I generally recommend against trying to grow any vegetables or herbs indoors. I see so many books with recommendations for ‘windowsill herbs’ and it’s a romantic idea, but in practice most of the time it just doesn’t work. Our houses are nearly always a lot darker than we think. Even bright window sills usually don’t have enough sunlight to sustain most edible plants for very long. Without adequate sunlight, these plants grow ‘leggy’ and weak and usually eventually die. If you want thriving herbs and salad greens - put them outdoors and in a spot where they get 6-8 hours of direct sunlight (preferably morning sunlight) each day.

Growing salad leaves: continual harvests

The great thing about most salad greens is that you can enjoy continual harvests - you don’t pick the whole plant in a single go. This is often referred to as ‘cut and come again’ harvesting - you pick only the older outer leaves of the plant, leaving new leaves to shoot out from the centre for future harvests. Some plants (like kale and silverbeet) can be harvested this way for months, even years! Sorrel is also a perennial (meaning you can plant it once and enjoy it year after year). Other plants (like lettuces) will give you a few solid weeks of continual harvest before they start to bolt.

If you want to grow year-round lettuce (and you live in a mild enough climate for that to be a possibility), you can try one of two tactics. If you’re an organised person you can use succession planting; sowing seeds for new lettuces as your earlier ones reach maturity. This should mean you’ve always got some lettuce that’s ready to pick at any given time (if you live in a mild climate like Perth, you can sow lettuce seeds all year round).

If you’re less organised you can just let your lettuces do their thing and leave them to go to seed in your garden. It won’t be a 100% perfect system but it’s actually worked very well for me in the past! As a lettuce starts to bolt (gets taller and begins to form buds), I leave it in the ground, wait for it to flower and produce seeds, then as it begins to dry I pull it up and dump the whole thing in a big pot plant or in an empty patch of garden (with the flower head in contact with the soil). A few weeks later, with near-zero effort on my part, new baby lettuces will start popping up! Provided you’ve fed your soil often and kept it well watered this is the easiest way to have lettuces on frequent rotation.

Basil plants starting to flower in late summer

Growing herbs for salads

Herbs are even easier to grow than salad greens, and many of them live longer too! I tend to group my herbs into three categories: perennial herbs that will grow for multiple years, biennial herbs that last only two years, flowering and setting seed in their second year, and annual herbs that will only last me one season. Depending on your climate, these lists might be different for you (if you have cold winters most herbs will need to be treated as annuals because they won’t make it through frosts). Regardless of whether they’re annuals or perennials, these are all very easy to grow herbs and well worth adding to your garden!

Perennial herbs

Mint, oregano, thyme, sage, marjoram, lemon grass, lovage, tarragon, thyme, lemon verbena, sorrel, winter savory, chives.

Biennial herbs

Parsley, caraway, chervil.

Annual herbs

Summer savory, basil, coriander (generally does better in the cooler months - it can quickly go to flower in warm weather), dill.

Growing herbs in pots

Most herbs do fantastically well in pots. In fact, most of our herbs do better in pots than in the garden. A lot of perennial herbs (like thyme, sage and marjoram) don’t mind the winter cold, but they don’t like getting ‘wet feet’ (i.e., sitting in soggy soil). After a few winters of repeatedly killing these herbs in our garden beds, I shifted them to pots where I could limit the amount of water they got over winter and change their location as the weather cooled. Now they enjoy winter vacations on our warm, sunny and dry balcony and I haven’t had a single death!

I also really recommend you grow your lemongrass in a pot as it can get HUGE and very difficult to remove if it’s left to do its thing in a garden bed for a few years. This is another lesson I’ve learnt from experience (getting your arms sliced up by lemongrass fronds while drying to dig out a massive root ball is, let’s say, not a fantastic pastime).

Herbs like parsley and basil I prefer to grow in the garden beds, as they can get lovely and big if allowed to grow to their full size in the garden. In its second year, parsley grows over a meter tall and sends up beautiful umbel shaped flowers that the bees love - it’s beautiful and so worth it if you have the space in your garden! Basil, too, seems to fare better in the garden. If you want to pop it in a pot just make sure to go for a nice big one.

Growing herbs indoors

Like growing salad greens indoors, attempting to grow herbs indoors is - honestly - almost always a waste of your time. With the exception of coriander (which can tolerate partial shade) my most successful herb harvests have always been from plants growing in full sun - it’s what they like best and what they need to thrive. Growing them outdoors is the perfect excuse for YOU to go outdoors more often too! Evening herb harvesting with a cocktail in hand beats pale benchtop basil any day!

Herbs to grow in winter

As I say, most herbs will survive winter if kept relatively dry and in a sunny position. The only herb that really definitely won’t make it through a Perth winter is basil. If you’re growing herbs from seed, you may have lower germination rates in the depths of winter, but sow coriander in autumn and you’ll enjoy it all through winter and into spring (when it will reward you with flowers).

Herbs to grow in summer

Herbs love summer! Basically all herbs will thrive in your summer garden, provided they get enough water. The one exception in our garden is coriander, which tends to go to flower more quickly in the warmer months. I don’t really mind though - the flowers are absolutely gorgeous and provided you sow seeds in partial shade you can still get a tasty harvest.

Buttercrunch lettuce heads poking out of a terracotta pot

The best salads for you: a year round review

Salads are delicious all year round but let’s face it, if you live in Australia the warm, sultry days that spread out languidly in between November and March are peak salad time. And, if you want to steal the show this Christmas with (between you and me) not that much effort, you want to have a few kickass salads up your sleeve. So, in honour of the sunny season, I’ve decided to share a few very special salads with you.

Some of these salads have come straight out of my two cookbooks, Pinch Dash Glug: Summer/Autumn and Pinch Dash Glug: Winter/Spring. And some of them have come from Seed to Supper (my online gardening membership program that teaches you how to grow your own food and cook your produce into delicious, seasonal dishes).

Give them a go, see if you like them, and if they leave you hungry for more you can check out my cookbooks (a limited number are still available to purchase) or click below to learn more about Seed to Supper.

You can put nasturtium leaves in your garden salads too - they’re peppery and pretty!

Summer salads

Best summer salads

The best summer salads have minimal time in-between harvesting the ingredients and throwing them together. If they contain fruits (think watermelons, mangos or rockmelon) you need to make sure you balance out the sweetness with something punchy and salty (like feta or capers). A light vinaigrette or lemony dressing works really well and doesn’t feel too heavy in the hot weather.

If you’re looking to whip something together really quickly with a handful of fresh greens, check out this salad dressing recipe for an easy and flavour-packed (read: intensely garlicky) dressing which I rely on basically all the time.

And now a summer salad from me to you: this salad comes straight out of my first seasonal cookbook, Pinch Dash Glug: Summer/Autumn. You can check out the cookbook here.

Autumn salads

Best autumn salads

The best autumn salads acknowledge (albeit begrudgingly) that summer has ended, that the days are growing shorted and cooler, and the time has come to add a little warmth and indulgence to our dinners. The happy truth about autumn is that it’s a brilliant time to be harvesting produce from your garden. Autumn is when the pumpkins are ripe, when apples start to fall off the trees and when lettuces can finally begin to grow more happily without wilting in the midday heat.

There are two key ingredients for a successful autumn salad: something roasted and something nutty. Adding a roasted vegetable to a salad is a genius move to help it graduate from Overlooked Side Dish to Star of the Show. And tossing nuts on top at the end is so easy and delicious it feels like cheating. Take 20 extra seconds to throw pine nuts, crushed walnuts, roasted hazelnuts or - really - any kind of nut into a salad and people will instantly assume you’ve spent an extra 30 minutes preparing it. It’s unfair, incorrect and fabulous!

Now, from me to you, an autumn salad to celebrate the last few tomatoes of the season, a new crop of crispy lettuces, the beginning of the winter citrus and the long-awaited pumpkin harvest. Also it has a browned butter dressing which you really need to slather on top of everything you cook for the foreseeable future.

Winter salads

Winter salads need to be a) hearty or b) warm. The truth is it’s just not very fun eating a cold, crispy and very vinegar-y salad on a frosty night. As far as I’m concerned, a winter salad either needs to be creamy or roasted. In this instance, the recipe I want to share with you is not roasted, but it’s creamy and cheesy as hell! Although now I think about it I haven’t often heard hell described as creamy or cheesy (two attributes that would work strongly in its favour).

Best winter salads

Anyway, if you want to make the most of winter’s awesome crunchy greens, toss them in this delicious dressing, cover them with cheese and fried bits of bread and hoe down on them while you wait for the warm weather to return.

(Incidentally if you feel like making this salad in the summertime it’s actually a delicious side for a BBQ!).

Spring salads

If there was one season to eat nothing but salads, it would be spring. Broad beans are popping (they taste amazing blanched and tossed in a light dressing), snake beans are on the way (boil them for a minute or two then serve with a dollop of pesto on top) and the salad greens are all growing leafy and giant and begging to be eaten!

Best spring salads

If you happen to grow/love fresh asparagus, now is the time to eat it! Deliciously sweet and truly one of spring’s best garden ingredients, asparagus is the star player in this salad, which is equal parts potato salad/egg salad/breakfast/lunch/dinner. It’s your everything salad, acceptable at all times of the day and in all circumstances. Also any dish that contains roast potato and still pretends to be a ‘salad’ is A-OK in my books!

And there you have it!

Four salad recipes to make the most of your garden produce all year round! And if you’re after some more ideas for easy salads to create this Christmas - stay tuned. I have four more salad recipes I’ll be sharing with you over the next few weeks!

Until then - stay crunchy and well dressed! ;-)

Xx Casey

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