This domain has been consistent that salad is not food in the energy sense, and grow for calories, not for salad puts the arithmetic plainly. So it is worth being clear about why a page on it exists at all.
Fast crops do three things nothing else does: they produce quickly, they produce repeatedly from one sowing, and they fill gaps in space and time that would otherwise be bare. In a household living on stored food for months, a bowl of fresh leaves is worth more to morale and to vitamin intake than its calorie content suggests.
What these are actually for
- Speed. Something to eat within a month of sowing, which no other crop offers.
- Vitamins. Stored food is poor in vitamin C and fresh leaves are not.
- Morale. Genuinely. Months of tinned and dried food with nothing fresh is grim, and it affects how well people eat.
- Filling gaps. Every bed that has been cleared and every corner between slower crops can carry a fast crop rather than weeds.
- Teaching. They germinate in days and crop in weeks, which is why they are the right thing to give a child a bed of.
They are not storage crops and not energy. Grow them alongside the potatoes and brassicas, not instead of them.
The fast list
Thinnings are food. Beetroot, chard, turnip and radish thinnings all go in a salad, which means the first crop from a bed arrives weeks before the actual harvest.
Cut and come again
The technique that makes salad worth the ground.
Rather than growing whole lettuces and pulling them, sow densely and harvest the outer leaves, leaving the growing point in the centre untouched.
- Cut across the row with scissors, a couple of centimetres above the base, or pick individual outer leaves.
- It regrows. Three or four cuts from one sowing is normal, and five or six from some varieties.
- Water and feed after cutting to keep it going.
- Loose-leaf varieties are bred for this. Hearting lettuces are not: they make one head and that is it.
- Mixed salad packets are convenient and give variety from one sowing.
This gets you five weeks of picking from one bed instead of one harvest, which changes the arithmetic on space considerably.
Rocket, mizuna, mustards, spinach, chard and many loose-leaf lettuces all take this treatment.
Succession
Sow little and often. A short row every two to three weeks beats a long row once.
- A metre of row at a time for a household, then again a fortnight later.
- Do not sow the whole packet. Seed keeps for years and a whole packet of radish at once is a compost heap in a fortnight. See seed saving for storage life.
- Keep going into autumn. Late sowings under cover crop through the winter.
- Write down what you sowed and when, because it is the only way to learn your own intervals.
A tray or two of module-sown plants ready to go is the technique that keeps a small garden continuously productive. When something is lifted, a plant goes straight in behind it rather than the bed sitting empty for a fortnight.
Catch cropping and intercropping
Getting two crops out of the same ground and the same time.
Catch cropping is using a bed in the gap between two slower crops. The ground is cleared in June after the broad beans and the winter brassicas do not go in until July, so a radish or salad crop fits in between.
Intercropping is growing a fast crop between the rows of a slow one, harvesting it before the slow crop needs the space.
- Radish between parsnip rows. Parsnips are slow to germinate; radish is up in days, marks the row, and is gone before the parsnips need room.
- Salad between brassicas while the brassicas are small.
- Lettuce between sweetcorn.
- Anything fast under and between anything slow.
The principle is that bare soil is wasted soil, and in a small garden this technique adds a meaningful amount of production for no extra ground.
Bolting
The main way fast crops fail, and it is mostly preventable.
Bolting is running to flower and seed, at which point the leaves turn bitter and tough and the plant is finished.
What triggers it:
- Heat, particularly for lettuce, rocket, spinach and coriander.
- Long days in midsummer.
- A check to growth: drought, root disturbance at transplanting, being pot-bound, or a sudden cold spell.
- Age. Everything bolts eventually.
What reduces it:
- Keep them growing steadily. Water consistently rather than letting them dry and then flooding them. See watering and drought.
- Some shade in midsummer. A row of salad on the shaded side of taller crops does much better in July than one in full sun.
- Sow in spring and autumn rather than fighting midsummer. Salad genuinely grows better in September than in July.
- Bolt-resistant varieties for the summer sowings.
- Sow direct where you can, since transplanting checks growth.
- Pick regularly. A plant being cropped stays vegetative longer.
A bolted plant is not entirely wasted. Let one go to seed and save it. See seed saving, where lettuce is one of the easy four.
Winter salad
The part that matters most for this app, because it produces in the months when nothing else does.
Sow in late summer and early autumn, and harvest slowly through the winter under cover.
- Sow August to September for winter picking, and October for early spring.
- Under cover. A cold frame, a cloche, a polytunnel or an unheated greenhouse. See growing under cover in this domain.
- What works: winter lettuces, land cress, corn salad or lamb's lettuce, mizuna, mustards, rocket, winter purslane, spinach.
- Growth is very slow from November to February, so the plants must be a decent size before the light goes. The size they reach by early November is roughly what you have to work with.
- Pick sparingly in the depths of winter, a few leaves at a time, and they will keep going.
- They accelerate in February, which is exactly the point in the hungry gap where fresh food is worth most.
Corn salad and land cress are the toughest and will crop outdoors unprotected in a mild winter.
Sprouts and shoots with no garden at all
The fastest fresh food there is, needing no soil, no light and no outdoor space.
Sprouted seeds in a jar produce fresh food in two to five days, indoors, in winter, from stored seed. It is the single most reliable source of fresh vegetable matter in the whole app, and it works when the ground is frozen. See sprouting seeds, and its real risk, which also covers the food safety side properly, because warm damp conditions grow bacteria as well as sprouts.
Pea shoots are the easiest of the lot. Dried marrowfat peas from a supermarket, sown thickly in a tray of compost on a windowsill, cut at about 10 centimetres in ten to fourteen days. They regrow once. They are cheap, quick, and genuinely good.
Microgreens are any salad, brassica or herb seed sown thickly in a shallow tray and cut at the seed leaf stage. Sunflower, radish, brassicas and coriander all work.
Windowsill herbs transform stored food. Parsley, chives, mint and coriander in pots by a bright window cost almost nothing and make a repetitive diet eatable.