Things You'll Need:
- Spinach seeds
- Swiss chard seeds
- Lettuce and radish seeds
- Beet seeds
- Nasturtium seeds
- Starter plants for tomatoes, cucumbers and broccoli
- Scallions or onion bulbs
- Dill seed
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Step 1
Plant a salad vegetable garden in neat rows, raised beds in plots or containers on the patio. Most salad vegetables require minimal space to grow and keep growing after cutting.
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Step 2
Begin a salad garden early in the planting season with cold loving spinach. Sow the seeds in April and pick this vegetable at the end of May for a spring treat. For an even earlier harvest, sow spinach seeds directly in the cold frame in early March.
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Step 3
Sow salad greens throughout the garden or in individual patches or rows. Plant Swiss chard along with red and green leaf lettuce for a salad garden that produces all summer. The lettuce grown in vegetable gardens looks and tastes nothing like the bleached heads of Iceberg found in grocery stores.
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Step 4
Plant radishes mixed with other seeds to mark the rows with fast growing shoots and to aerate the soil with the radish roots. Radishes also taste good in a salad when sliced thin and slightly salted.
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Step 5
Include red beets and chicory in the salad vegetable garden. Snip off the leaves of early sown beets to add to salads and leave the beet roots to continue growing for a fall harvest.
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Step 6
Set a nasturtium seed in the soil at the end of each garden row to grow an edible flower that adds a radish-like zing and beautiful color to a garden salad. Use the round nasturtium leaves as a salad green too.
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Step 7
Stake a trellis or fence in the garden to for cherry tomatoes, cucumber vines or snap pea pods. Plant the peas early as seed and put in small starter tomato and cucumber plants when the soil gets warm.
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Step 8
Place one or two small broccoli plants in the early garden with scallions and dill seed planted around as companion plants. Broccoli does well in cool weather and provides two or three cuttings through the season.
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Step 9
Harvest the salad garden by cutting the greens off about an inch from the ground, beginning at one end of the vegetable garden and working to the other side. Keep repeating this process for a continuous summer harvest.
