CC
for joining us today for Grow >> HellYour Own Salad.d thanks
I'm Susan Mahr. I'm the statewide coordinator
for the UW Extension Master Gardener program.
I'm housed at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
I'm guessing you're all here
and want to find out how easy it because you enjoy eating salad
So today we're going to be is for you to grow your own.
salad. talking about growing your own
about just some real general First off, I'm going to talk
vegetables. We're going to talk, primarily,
about lettuce because, as you all know, that's the basis for
most salads.
other leafy greens that are really easy to grow, briefly
mention some other vegetables,
I really can't get into any but detail on growing them. time
I also want to mention growing
some special considerations as in containers because they have
the ground. opAnd then, finally, I'll justin
make a brief mention on growing vegetables as ornamentals.
There are other programs on that
I don't have a handout, but if particular topic, though.
six-page text on what I'm ytalking about, not the exacta
slide outlines but the general
website at topics, it's available on the
rowyourownsalad.pdf. mywebspace.wisc.edu/semahr/web/g
So why would you want to grow So your own lettuce and othered.
greens? There's a number of reasons, one
of which is it's much fresher than you can get at any grocery
store.
competition with the farmers' markets who are providing nice,
fresh lettuce, but you know how you're growing it if you grow it
yourself. If you want to go all organic,
you have that choice. If it's not that important to
you, you can use whatever pesticides you might be
interested in or types of fertilizers.
Maybe it's less expensive depending on the vegetable, but
I'm sure you've all heard those stories of the $64 tomato which
may not be cost-effective.
lettuce, it really is very easy to grow that plant and very
cost-effective. One reason I prefer to grow my
own lettuce is it gives you many
There's a vast number of more choices in varieties.
we'll be talking about a little dbit later that you just can'tat
get in the grocery store. Go to the typical grocery store,
you get Iceberg, maybe red, maybe green leaf lettuce, and
that's pretty much it.
little bit more choice, but in At a farmers' market you get a
hundreds and hundreds of the seeds catalogs there's
And let's not forget the varieties to choose from.
food and enjoying it fresh from satisfactithe garden.ng your own
So those are the main reasons people enjoy growing, not just
salad garden vegetables, but all
satisfaction, the ability to kinds of plants is for the
the way you want it and enjoy it choose what you want and grow it
So some general considerations at peak freshness.
vegetables are that they really need full sun to do well.
That's very hard to grow many vegetables in shady conditions.
So if you have a lot of trees,
creative in how you can position you're going to have to be
have to be in containers, to get plants, and it will probably
do well. them into the light they need to
for growing any plant, but Soil preparation is essential
If you don't have the proper especially for vegetables.
they're just not going to develop and produce the way you
want them to. I'm not going to be getting into
great detail on any of this stuff because there are plenty
of other references and books to
process of developing your own help guide you through the
compost, digging, and building soil through the addition of
But if you do have poor soil, adding compost is a great way to
make it better. If you have really heavy soil,
like I do at home, building raised beds and filling that
with compost is another excellent way to get around that
problem of not having the best
Now, in terms of actually planting these things, it really
doesn't matter how you do it. Yes we can go with the
traditional farming type system where everything is planted in
long rows, but it's just as effective to put smaller areas
into blocks of crops. So scattering the seed, rather
than putting them specifically
the space that you might have for a higher yield in a smaller
space.
seeding small-seeded crops, like It's very important when you're
those seedlings so they're not lettuce, to make sure you thin
out-competing each other for so crowded that they're
so you end up with lots of moisture, light, and nutrients
one nice, big plant. small, spindly things instead of
that, which we'll be talking There are some exceptions to
to consider. about later, but it's something
ignore them, and come back and You can't just seed the plants,
And just like any other plant, harvest them.
vegetables need watering. If we're growing these outside
in the yard, rain may be
it's not, you're going to have sufficient, but at times where
to irrigate those vegetables to tget peak production from them.
And probably the bane of all
uninvited plants. The weeds that are developing in
any place.
monitoring for those things, So you have to be careful to be
small. getting them out when they're
as the plants are getting Ibigger, the same size as yourm
crop, you may inadvertently damage your crop when you're
removing them.
helpful for maintaining a highly So timely weeding is very
And I would caution all of you productive garden.
and starting out too big. There's nothing like saying, I'm
going to plant this 20 by 20
month when the weeds have gotten garden, and after the first
and having to give up. away from you, being frustrated
more likely to have success, So if you start small, you're
in the future. more likely to want to continue
you're getting started. So we really are going to focus
on lettuce as the base of most
easy crops to grow. saIt really doesn't take muchre
effort to get a really nice crop
It's one of the oldest known of lettuce.
It was brought to North America a long, long time ago with the
first immigrants coming here, and it doesn't require a whole
lot of space. Plants are fairly small.
They can be harvested at almost any stage of growth.
It doesn't have a whole lot of
You may encounter some insect or pest problems.
but, in general, compared to disease problems on occasion,
relatively pest-free. And this is another easy thing
because you can just stick the
You don't have to start them seeds in the ground.
tomatoes. You don't have to worry about
getting the right light as
It's a short-season crop. It doesn't take long to develop
so you can have multiple crops
If you have a little bit of a failure with one, you have
plenty of time to try again.
very diverse plant to consider So it's a flexible, easy, and
So we can categorize lettuce growing for your salad garden.
the way the leaves grow. into four main types based on
Iceberg or Crisphead lettuce So there's that traditional
very crispy leaves. wThe cells are rather firm, ands
when you bit into them they release a little burst of juice
and they're rather crunchy. Compare that to the Butterhead,
which is a leaf type of lettuce where it's much softer and
smoother. Very different texture and very
different flavor. The Romaine, or cos, is a much
more upright version so the leaves are more elongate and the
plant grows more upright rather than spreading.
It forms a very loose head, just
Not as tight as that Crisphead. And, finally, we have the
category of everything else that
or the leaf lettuces. dAnd those come in a variety of,
different types of leaves where they're either very plain or
ornamental and fancy. And we've got hundreds and
hundreds of different cultivars that go back way into our
history so there's lots of
well as knew hybrids that have heirloom varieties of lettuce as
characteristics such as nice, tiny heads or big, frilly leaves
or something like that. They come in a lot of different
colors and combinations of
to just green. colors, so we're not relegated
There are ones that have streaks There are red tinged ones.
or red overlaid with green. So a variety of different colors
as well as shapes.
to be flat and smooth, others So some overy crinkly.are going
May have ruffled edges on them. And so you can select these to
provide a nice contrast in
flavors to make a fabulous, unique salad just by picking out
a variety of different lettuces.
buy 10 different varieties, the Now,seeds companies are very and
obliging and have created nice
taken some of their favorites mixturand put together.lready
Many of them are exclusively
mixes, and mesclun is just a lettuce, but many of the mesclun
it's used to designate a mixture french word that means mix, but
greens that grow well together. And that's a nice combination
for adding in even further
texture. differences in taste and
be included in those mesclun So many of the things that would
that have a more peppery and mixes we'll talk about later
smooth lettuces for even more tvariety within that mixture.d
So, as I mentioned, there are a lot of heirloom varieties out
there.
so if you let the lettuce go to Thseed, they will come true to,
seed. In contrast to that, there's a
number of hybrid varieties where
crossed, and the offspring from those crosses don't necessarily
come true.
from those hybrids, you may not end up with the same plant thatd
you originally put in the ground.
But with the heirloom varieties,
them, you will get same or very, and there's an awful lot of
progeny from those plants. very similar plants in the
if you are interested in saving Sseeds, it may determine whichut
type of plant you choose to put in your garden.
Growing lettuce, this is one of the easiest things to do.
It's a cool season crop, which
ground relatively early. means we can get it in the
you are from north to south, In Wisconsin, depending on where
March into early May. And it also obviously depends on
the season and the weather. There are ways to extend the
season by covering the soil to
starting things indoors, but get it warmed up a little more,
mid-spring when you can be we're generally talking about
garden. So, you want to be putting it
out approximately four to six weeks before the average last
frost for your first planting.
it in, but you can put it in a That's the earliest you can put
Most of the lettuce varieties will be maturing within 60 to 90
days depending on what it is, and many of them you can harvest
much earlier than that. So you can get a crop out in
just a weeks if you want, particularly if you're going
just for leaves rather than for perfect heads.
Using a raised bed will also
earlier so that you can get planting earlier than you might
otherwise if you're just
ground. We don't want to put the seeds
in too deeply so that the seedlings don't have a hard time
pushing out of the ground, but
moist either through natural it does need to be kept evenly
ground until those seeds have rainfalgerminated.ling the
Particularly, in certain types
crusting, if you let the soil odry out, it will form an
impenetrable layer that the seedlings just can't break
through.
they're going through the So germination process is as
important.
package of lettuce seed, you're getting a couple hundred up to a
thousand seeds in that package. And very few people want that
many heads of lettuce ripening
So I would highly recommend planting just a fraction of that
seed packet and making
So put in one short row or a successive plantings.
weeks, three weeks later, put in small block now, one week, two
that you have spaced out harvest another equivalent planting so
lettuce party to get rid of all that with your friends all at
once. So successive plantings are the
key to enjoying lettuce throughout the season.
Now, if you intend to grow your plants to form a head,
particularly for the
going to need to space them head-farmappropriately.n you're
And this, if you've seeded them in the ground in a row, means
you're going to have to take out
between. a lot of the little ones in
You can just pull them out, you can clip them off with scissors,
but get rid of them so that you leave just a select few plants
in order to develop in the space
You should check the seed packet, if it's not a mix, to
determine what that spacing should be.
And that is determined by the way the plant grows.
The cos or Romaine types don't
because they don't spread out as take as much room between plants
Lettuce doesn't put down deep much as the roots.orming ones.
So as you're cultivating to keep
be cognizant of that. You don't want to be scratching
up the soil surface so much that
You can mulch around the plants to help conserve moisture, but
you want to wait until the
you can actually work around plants are big enough so that
that organic mulch. tSo, in the heat of the summer,n
so when temperatures are warm,
warmth and long days, lettuce tends to go to seed or it bolts.
That makes it a little bit
summer in Wisconsin. harder to grow lettuce in the
difficult. Not impossible but more
cooler by planting it in shadier If you can keep temperatures
get a crop through. There are some varieties that
are more resistant to bolting,
lettuces or something like that, oftentimes called summer
of the summer. that can be used during the heat
varieties, they're going to do With most of the lettuce
That means spring and fall. But we can extend that planting
season through the summer by
varieties, harvesting earlier tabefore the plant has had at
chance to go through the process
So we want to avoid plants of going to seed.
over-maturity and heat growing too long because both
that you oftentimes experience contribute to that bitter flavor
We get the most fabulous taste with lettuce.
because you have nice, succulent in early spring or in the fall
off. lettuce that's being frosted
and more tender than plants that It's going to be a lot sweeter
of the summer or plants that have been grown during the heat
long. haOne thing that's nice abouttoo
lettuce is that it grows quickly
be harvested and then allow for and other plants to grow in.ly,
So you can try intercropping
plants that will be put in later lettuce between other larger
So some of our warm season or take a long time to develop.
they start out pretty small. crops, like tomatoes or peppers,
them to plant a crop of lettuce and get it out of the ground by
the time those other plants have
So particularly if you are spread to fill in that space.
area, that's a great way to get a couple of crops in the same
space in that interplanting.
you don't have to wait for Now, as I alluded to earlier,
to eat it. lettuce to form a head in order
any time. So we can look at the different
categories here of these
harvested, and they're calling different stages when greens are
as microgreens. sStill very small, just one orff
two leaves. That's probably not a highly
efficient use of your time
these things over and over unless you want to be seeding
But then after they're a little bit older, the leaves are three,
four, five inches long, several leaves per plant, you can be
cutting back the entire planting
oftentimes what you'll get as fbagged salad greens are these's
plants that have been growing just maybe a month, six weeks,
something like that.
you don't cut them all the way With some of these plants, if
nubbin of the crown, they will to the ground and leave a little
So you can be snipping off the regenerate.
next set of leaves to grow out entire plant and wait for the
Another way to harvest these are of it.
after the plants have gotten a to just cut individual leaves
So taking them off from around little bit bigger.
So you get to eat part of the plant, leaving the rest to grow
and develop more leaves as you
But if you do want that nice, perfect head, then you're going
to have to wait.
leaves off the exterior of the You might be able to pick a few
you're usually going to look at the seed packet to guess about
when, how many weeks, how many
mature. daAnd then you're going to bebe
cutting that entire plant off at
out of the ground. ground level or pulling it up
regeneration if you leave the It'roots in the ground.me
Oftentimes those heads are going
Sometimes they don't form a nice to be much smaller.
some more leaves. cSo if you don't want to maket
successive plantings, you can harvest in expecting the plant
to regrow again for you.
plantings, you get successive In lieu oharvests.uccessive
So there are a lot of different ways you can utilize the crops
of lettuce that you're growing. Just like lettuce, we've got all
kinds of other leafy greens,
plants that you can plant at the most of which are cool season
So I've got a long list of them up here on the screen that I'm
not going to get into great detail on other than a couple of
them. I should mention that that
Malabar spinach is a warm season
People say it's like spinach. Personally, I do not find the
taste very similar to spinach,
satisfactory alternative. But other people think it's fine
and they like it in its own right as a different crop
entirely. But all of the other things up
there are cool season crops that
season. Some of them, like the Swiss
chard, will last throughout the season, and even as large
plants, you can continue growing
Even if we would typically be using those leaves in the
smaller stage for salads, they
Arugula is one of my favorites. It commands great prices at the
farmers' market and in the
It is just as easy as lettuce to grocery store.
Throw some seeds in the ground, and within a few weeks, you have
harvestable leaves. This has a rather bold or
peppery taste.
so you might want to sample it Some people aren't fond of that,
entire garden in Arugula, but I bfind it, if I put it in earlyr
enough, the plant will go to
edible and it will self-seed in flower bmy garden.wers are
So I typically put in just a
self-seed for a fall harvest as spring plantwell.hat will then
So it does grow very quickly. The juvenile foliage doesn't
have lobes on the leaves. They're smooth on the edges, but
as the plant matures, the leaves
I like the strong flavor so I don't have a problem eating the
older leaves, the flowers, and
not as fond of the flavor, then you might want to stick with the
younger, more juvenile foliage
But I would highly recommend that isn't' quite as strong.
easy crop. trying this because it's a very
fairly easy. Spinach is another one that's
time with germination. It has a little more difficult
lengthy, overall, for the seeds to germinate than lettuce and ae
little bit more spotty. So you may have uneven
germination with spinach. But in terms of growing it, the
culture is pretty much the same as lettuce.
It's also a fairly tough crop,
spinach over winter in my garden and I've actually had some
then you get a wonderful crop lightlearly in the season.d, and
In fact, one year I covered it
as New Year's for a New Year's up in November and uncovered it
which is a little bit tricky to Eve sdo here in Wisconsin.arden
So these tend to be slow to emerge in the spring, and, once
again, just like with lettuce,
competition from weeds, but, you need to be concerned about
much like lettuce. basically, the culture is pretty
lettuce. Harvesting is very similar to
leaves, you can wait for the You can harvest individual
spinach does tend to go to seed much more regularly than the
lettuce would, regardless of
So it's best grown as a spring variety.
mid-August for fall harvest crop and thcrop.ter sown in
It really just does not do well in the summer.
Now, I really don't have time to
wonderful vegetables that you gecould be putting into yourer
salad.
season plants that can be direct Radish and carrots are also cool
Radishes, I think everybody knows, is a very quick growing
crop. So you could have real quick
satisfaction with that. It's a great crop for kids to
try because the seeds are large enough to handle, they grow
quickly enough and produce
that kids don't have to wait something that you can harvest
It's not immediate satisfaction aroundbut pretty close. time.
Cucumber, tomatoes are warm season crops that are more
complicated to grow just because
Although they can be seeded directly into the ground, that
sometimes poses a challenge for those, particularly in more
northern areas, that have a short growing season to try to
get some fruit before the first killing frost.
And so we have to, oftentimes,
early, purchasing seedlings to resort to starting these things
that involves a lot more work tthan many of these cool seasono
crops that are easily planted directly into the garden.
So, there's an awful lot more information out there about
growing other vegetables, and we're not going to focus on any
of those today. What I want to talk about now is
shifting gears from thinking
whatever they may be, in the about planting these vegetables,
containers. So why would that even be
necessary?
apartment and only have a What if balcony?d in an
What if you have black walnut trees around and want to grow
something that's susceptible to the Juglan?
What if you have mostly shady yard and have no sunny spot in
the ground to plant these things?
Those are all great reasons to
a container. resort to planting your crops in
really isn't all that much Growing vegetables in containers
the ground other than a few dconsiderations that they'rein
going to need more care in terms
with the smaller root space those resources get exhaustede
much more quickly than they would in the ground.
Another advantage of growing in containers is that you don't
have to worry about it being
So you could be starting things in containers right now if you
wanted if you had decent light
outside or transplant outside later, get a jump on the season.
If you do want to utilize containers for vegetables,
particularly for larger plants, like peppers and tomatoes, it's
really important to make the
I think most people are aware that there's a great range of
sizes of tomatoes, and there's
tomato plants. also a range in the size of
container and put a huge tomato in it,that's not going to be a
very good combination.
getting patio varieties or So you want to think about
to grow in smaller spaces, things that have been developed
containers because those plants will perform much better under
those conditions than if you
like. It's possible, if you're using a
half whiskey barrel, you
tomato cultivar in there, but if probably could grow any type of
containers, then you really want you have limited space and small
size of the plant that you're going to be growing in there and
whether that's appropriate. I do have a picture of one of
those upside-down tomato growing
popular lately. There's nothing really wrong
with them, but they're really just a gimmick.
Plants don't normally grown down.
They really are designed to grow
should you make them grow down up and toward the light, and why
Some people swear by these and then back up?
much better yield, I can water saying that oh, yes, it provides
case, fine. There's nothing wrong with them,
but your traditional container
the top are just as good. wheAnd you don't need to haveout
anything really fancy to grow your lettuce in.
So I have an example here.
left on the slide, but I also Ihave the same container here
with my little box of lettuce.
old clementine box that I've And this is nothing more than an
keep the growing medium from lined with landscape fabric to
And I have a nice crop of fallettuce growing here.ks.
Now, admittedly, I have access
university... to a g[LAUGHTER]at the
Where the plants have gotten a lot better light this
time of year. It's very difficult to produce a
crop like this at this time of
short days and low light. But if you're highly motivated
and have some grow lights, you
similar. can accomplish something
your lettuce plants now, you're Angoing to have much bettereed
results as our day length is
the sun is increasing. increasing and the intensity of
really fun to do. I have a mixture of different
things in here. Unfortunately, all of the red
varieties haven't colored up yet
particularly spectacular in icolor, but there's lots of
different leaf shapes and forms and I did plant a mesclun in
here so we have some things other than lettuce mixed
in with that. My other example of a container
is just an old hanging pot that I transplanted a few things
into. These are still fairly small,
but that's a perfectly good salad garden right there, and I
didn't have to go out and buy anything for it.
So you don't have to have any special equipment, any special
materials other than a good potting medium and drainage for
your plants.
don't like to sit in water. They need good drainage for the
roots.
that's the most important thing Thto provide plants is goodso
drainage. So even if you're using an old
coffee can, if you poke enough
will come out, that is a holes in the bottom so the water
lettuce and other things. So you can be as creative as you
want. In boxes, you can put them up on
tables. The illustration on the lower
right is a series of old pots, a
mine has sitting on a couple of sawhorses and planks on herf
driveway because she has no sun in her otherwise tree-covered
lot.
there. And she has a wonderful garden
audience. >> I was wondering, we see, at
this expo we see these grow boxes.
Are these another gimmick or is there an advantage to them?
So the question was about grow boxes that we've seen there
at Garden Expo, are they gimmick
They're probably just fine. I'm not actually familiar with
that product specifically, but a
gardens, let's say, provide you with everything you need.d
So they're kind of like a kit making it easy access,
particularly for people who don't have a whole lot of space
to look for all these different things and whatnot.
Really, all you need is a way of
whether that's soil or a containing the growing medium,
like is really up to you, soil-leornamental or not.t looks
It can be as, I don't know if you consider the tangerine box
ugly, but maybe not as
it's perfectly functional and is decorative as it could be, but
of lettuce. gSo I think anything will work.
The salad box or the salad table
Gardener program coordinator in Maryland has developed, and he
has plans for this on the website that's listed at the
bottom of that slide. And it's basically creating a
frame of whatever size that has a mesh screen bottom on it to
provide for good drainage.
medium and add a couple handles on it to make it more portable,
easier to move around.
same box but with legs on it. And so they're really promotinge
that as a way to get people to
So if you've got a little scrap lumber, preferably not treated
because we don't want to have to
that are used in the treatment be dealing with the chemicals
wood, we don't want those leaching into the vegetables
you're going to be eating, but
very easy to construct. You can go get your husbands out
there, get your kids, get the 4H
of these things, and you can be sutilizing this if you want ae
nice compact way to grow lettuce
[INAUDIBLE] >> The website, I.
will read that off because the
Www.growit.umd.edu and then lesalad and because they leftl.
spaces in their PDF line, you have to put in the code %20,
which just indicates a space. So
salad%20tables%20and%20salad%20 boxes.
Got all that, right?
Otherwise, I'd suggest just Googling salad box Maryland.
[LAUGHTER]
a lot easier. Just briefly as we're getting
close to ending here, I want to talk about incorporating
vegetable plants into the ornamental garden, particularly
as people are downsizing and
You want it all but you think you don't have space for both
your traditional vegetable
Well, you don't have to put gardevegetables in rows.rden.
And you don't have to have them all by themselves out in the
back 40.
appropriate soil and light You can, as long as you have the
your other pretty plants. One thing that you do have to
consider if you're trying to
you're going to be harvesting with ornamentals is how you're
going to deal with what's left
And, particularly with lettuce, if you intend to harvest the
entire plant, what's going to happen to that space once you've
taken the head or the parts of
Like I mentioned before with that lettuce plant out of there.
later growing plants, you might ibe able to put some lettuce in,
between different perennials or annuals that grow later in the
season that then will fill in those gaps.
It might be a bit more
with similar sized annuals. So you just have to think about
that and do a little more planning in order to fit them
into the scheme so that it all
So many of the things that we've works out right.
attractive. Many of these lettuce cultivars
are just as beautiful as any of the leafy fuller plants that we
grow in our garden. And just because they're pretty
doesn't mean that you can't eat them.
So try to incorporate them
containers is pretty easy. either in gardens or in
from Olbrich Botanic Gardens Both of these illustrations are
So they do a fabulous job of here in Madison.
lettuce and other leafy greens integrating spring flowers and
They also have a spectacular in the early season.
distance, you'd be hard pressed to know it's not an ornamental
garden because they have done such a good job with garden
design and putting these plants together in a pleasing
arrangement whether they're going to be harvested or not
that it looks just as beautiful as any ornamental garden.
So if you're trying to use
it with annuals is very easy. leIn this case, it's probablying
better to go ahead and start
small size, and then transplant them into place just so that you
can position them more carefully
self-seed them and you're not sure whether they're actually
going to germinate in that
Lettuce plants look wonderful with spring blooms.
So that illustration on the right top is tulips, at Olbrich
once again, which they have under planted with lettuce in
the same container. And it provides a nice filler
around the scraggly stalks of the tulips, and you can eat
those just about the time the tulips have finished blooming.
You probably don't want those around anymore.
Take out the lettuce, eat it, and then stick the pot in some
less conspicuous spot to allow
replace that pot with something thnew and more interesting.nd
I've grown them in my garden as a border.
So the red little cones on the
left of the slide are the fvariety Lola Rosa which is a
heritage or heirloom variety of red lettuce with very frilly
leaves. And it's self-seeded for me
every year for the last five
go through and reposition those things so that they're spacedt
appropriately to form a border
And I don't even bother to or something else.
enough lettuce growing harvest them because I have
to form this border and eventually they will go to seed,
forming these very interesting
anxious to know what is that cones that people are always
Well, that's just the lettuce reallgoing to seed.here.
[LAUGHTER ] So they can be ornamental
even when they're not at their prime in terms of
growing as a vegetable plant. But it's really fun to
incorporate these sorts of
other plants like this that are thinvery good for edging.ot of
Many of our herbs, like parsley,
Parsley is particularly nice for is very ornamental.
plantings because you're not incorporating into edible
generally, just picking a few harleaves here or there.ant
And so it's very easy to
taking the whole thing out. But there are all kinds of other
edible plants, some of which we talked about, others that we
didn't, that make spectacular additions to the ornamental
garden. I particularly like the Swiss
chards that have brightly colored petioles, and if you can
position them so that you're
through the leaves and the getting the light to shine
that may be evening depending on petioles, that may be morning,
when you're planning to be out what you work schedule is and
They can really be spectacular in the garden.
through. with the light filtering
bright lights which offers a There's a nice variety called
from white, yellow, cream, range of colors of the petioles
bunch of those in. orange, pink, and red, and put a
in one area, wait until I see Wwhat the colors are, and thenem
transplant them to where I want them to coordinate or contrast
with other nearby plants. Another great way to utilize
some of these plants, like beets
varieties that have dark colored or the kales, are to select
that provides a lot of foliar leinterest because it's verynd
different from the green, providing a nice splash of color
mixed in with the other things. So there are a lot of ways to be
very creative with vegetable
so that you can have the best of plants in an ornamental setting
So I would encourage you to experiment..
Try some of these things and
[APPLAUSE] enjoy your salad.
lots of questions over here. It looks like we have
the question of good potting >> [INAUDIBLE] Can you speak to
If you plant in a seedless mixture?
actually grow in that medium? >> In a soil-less mixture you
mean? >> Yes.
And typically for growing in
using garden soil because it containers, we do not recommend
compact, and doesn't promote tends to be very heavy, will
the potential to harbor pathogens that could affect your
plants. So it's generally recommended to
use a good quality commercial soil-less growing medium.
So there are various brands on
Fafard is another. the market, Miracle-Gro has one,
moss or pine bark or something Most of these are based on peat
any soil in it. elseWhen you're growing in aave
container, particularly if
like that, as you're watering the plants, you're washing away
a lot of the nutrients. So you need to be replacing
those in the form of fertilizer.
synthetic, that really doesn't Whether that's organic or
That's entirely up to you. matter.
soil-less medium for growing So it's preferable to use a
that it does not have all the pnutrients that the plant willer
need over the entire growing
providing that supplementally.
When can we start the plants
growing lamp? Like if we want to do lettuce
and we have full sun? >> If you're starting lettuce,
you can put that in a relatively
do that on a window sill. sWe probably will be able toen
start planting lettuce outside, at least in the Madison area,
let's say early April.
weeks and that would be about when you would want to start the
seedlings for transplanting out.
put them in a container, that provides a lot more flexibility
because you could be moving them
bringing them back inside when out on nice days and then
them so that you can get a it's going to be too cold for
season. liYou potentially could bee
starting to grow them now.
good light, you're going to end Iup with a more straggly plantor
than you might otherwise. So it's something to consider
and it's hard for me to make a
knowing your specific specific rconditions.on without
But those are all things to keep
How much light you have, can you in mind.
If you can't even grow some of grow any plants in your house?
light, then lettuce probably the tropicals that require low
to start now if you can't provide some supplemental light.
But by April you should be able to be seeding these things
outside.
be transplanting things out at If you start them now, you could
If you are starting any plants that point.
it's very important to acclimate indoors, lettuce or otherwise,
environment of the indoors to much harsher conditions that
they'll be experiencing outside.
first beautiful day of spring, So instead of saying it's the
out in the garden, resist the Iurge to do that and make sureng
that you've been moving your
protected location, bringing plants out daily into a more
get used to being buffeted by the wind, the stronger intensity
of the light and whatnot. Just like if you and I go out on
the first day of spring with no sunscreen on, what's going to
happen? You're going to get sunburned.
Plants will experience the same thing if they're not toughened
up. So you need toughen up your
transplants over a period of a
out in the garden, otherwise week or two before putting them
take longer to get established. th>> Tricks in dealing withand
rabbits?
[LAUGHTER] >> Get a cat.
little bit challenging. If you don't have other
predators around, whether those be cats, coyotes, or fox or
whatever, to discourage them, fences can be effective.
If you don't want that, there are some repellents.
I really don't know about their effectiveness.
They can be a difficulty. Putting things in containers up
out of their reach may be your
onOther questions?.
I was just wondering if you could your website back up for
information for us. >> There it is.
Thank you.
questions, thank you for coming. >> Well, if there are no other
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