Wisconsin Public Television University Place Garden Expo 2012  Susan Mahr Grow Your Own Salad  February 11, 2012 UP688  CC >> Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us today for Grow Your Own Salad. 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 because you enjoy eating salad and want to find out how easy it is for you to grow your own. So today we're going to be talking about growing your own salad. First off, I'm going to talk about just some real general information about growing vegetables. We're going to talk, primarily, about lettuce because, as you all know, that's the basis for most salads. I'm going to talk about some other leafy greens that are really easy to grow, briefly mention some other vegetables, but in this short period of time I really can't get into any detail on growing them. I also want to mention growing in containers because they have some special considerations as opposed to growing vegetables in the ground. 

And then, finally, I'll just make a brief mention on growing vegetables as ornamentals. There are other programs on that particular topic, though. I don't have a handout, but if you're interested in getting a six-page text on what I'm talking about, not the exact slide outlines but the general topics, it's available on the website at mywebspace.wisc.edu/semahr/web/g rowyourownsalad.pdf. So with that, we'll get started. So why would you want to grow your own lettuce and other greens? There's a number of reasons, one of which is it's much fresher than you can get at any grocery store. You're probably in the same 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. But if we're talking about 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 more choices in varieties. There's a vast number of different types of lettuces that we'll be talking about a little bit later that you just can't 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. At a farmers' market you get a little bit more choice, but in the seeds catalogs there's hundreds and hundreds of varieties to choose from. And let's not forget the satisfaction of growing your own food and enjoying it fresh from the garden. So those are the main reasons people enjoy growing, not just salad garden vegetables, but all kinds of plants is for the satisfaction, the ability to choose what you want and grow it the way you want it and enjoy it at peak freshness. So some general considerations for growing almost all 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, you're going to have to be creative in how you can position plants, and it will probably have to be in containers, to get them into the light they need to do well. Soil preparation is essential for growing any plant, but especially for vegetables. 

If you don't have the proper nutrition for those plants, 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 help guide you through the process of developing your own soil through the addition of compost, digging, and building up the soil that way. 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 soil to start with. 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 in rows, is one way to maximize the space that you might have for a higher yield in a smaller space. It's very important when you're seeding small-seeded crops, like lettuce, to make sure you thin those seedlings so they're not so crowded that they're out-competing each other for moisture, light, and nutrients so you end up with lots of small, spindly things instead of one nice, big plant. There are some exceptions to that, which we'll be talking about later, but it's something to consider. You can't just seed the plants, ignore them, and come back and harvest them. 

And just like any other plant, lettuce and salad greens and vegetables need watering. If we're growing these outside in the yard, rain may be sufficient, but at times where it's not, you're going to have to think about how you're going to irrigate those vegetables to get peak production from them. And probably the bane of all gardeners are those other uninvited plants. The weeds that are developing in any place. So you have to be careful to be monitoring for those things, getting them out when they're small. If you're trying to remove them as the plants are getting bigger, the same size as your crop, you may inadvertently damage your crop when you're removing them. So timely weeding is very helpful for maintaining a highly productive garden. And I would caution all of you against being overenthusiastic and starting out too big. There's nothing like saying, I'm going to plant this 20 by 20 garden, and after the first month when the weeds have gotten away from you, being frustrated and having to give up. So if you start small, you're more likely to have success, more likely to want to continue in the future. 

So try not to over do it as you're getting started. So we really are going to focus on lettuce as the base of most salads and also one of the more easy crops to grow. It really doesn't take much effort to get a really nice crop of lettuce. It's one of the oldest known vegetables. 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 pest problems. You may encounter some insect or disease problems on occasion, but, in general, compared to many other vegetables, it's relatively pest-free. And this is another easy thing because you can just stick the seeds in the ground. 

You don't have to start them indoors, like you do with tomatoes. You don't have to worry about getting the right light as they're developing indoors. It's a short-season crop. It doesn't take long to develop so you can have multiple crops in a season. If you have a little bit of a failure with one, you have plenty of time to try again. So it's a flexible, easy, and very diverse plant to consider growing for your salad garden. So we can categorize lettuce into four main types based on the way the leaves grow. So there's that traditional Iceberg or Crisphead lettuce which, as the name suggests, has very crispy leaves. The cells are rather firm, and 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 like the Butterhead does. Not as tight as that Crisphead. And, finally, we have the category of everything else that doesn't form a nice, tight head, or the leaf lettuces. And 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 heirloom varieties of lettuce as well as knew hybrids that have been selected for various 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 colors, so we're not relegated to just green. There are red tinged ones. There are ones that have streaks of red in them, spots on them, or red overlaid with green. 

So a variety of different colors as well as shapes. So some of the leaves are going to be flat and smooth, others very crinkly. May have ruffled edges on them. And so you can select these to provide a nice contrast in colors, textures, shapes, and flavors to make a fabulous, unique salad just by picking out a variety of different lettuces. Now, if you don't want to go and buy 10 different varieties, the seeds companies are very obliging and have created nice mixtures that they've already taken some of their favorites and put together. Many of them are exclusively lettuce, but many of the mesclun mixes, and mesclun is just a french word that means mix, but it's used to designate a mixture of lettuce and other leafy greens that grow well together. And that's a nice combination for adding in even further differences in taste and texture. So many of the things that would be included in those mesclun mixes we'll talk about later that have a more peppery and tart flavor than the sweet and smooth lettuces for even more variety within that mixture. So, as I mentioned, there are a lot of heirloom varieties out there. These are open pollinated ones, so if you let the lettuce go to seed, they will come true to seed. 

In contrast to that, there's a number of hybrid varieties where they have two parents that are crossed, and the offspring from those crosses don't necessarily come true. So even though you can save seed from those hybrids, you may not end up with the same plant that you originally put in the ground. But with the heirloom varieties, and there's an awful lot of them, you will get same or very, very similar plants in the progeny from those plants. So just something to think about if you are interested in saving seeds, it may determine which 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 means we can get it in the ground relatively early. In Wisconsin, depending on where you are from north to south, that may be anywhere from late 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 get it warmed up a little more, starting things indoors, but we're generally talking about mid-spring when you can be seeding things out in the garden. So, you want to be putting it out approximately four to six weeks before the average last frost for your first planting. 

That's the earliest you can put it in, but you can put it in a lot longer. 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 help warm the soil, dry it out earlier so that you can get planting earlier than you might otherwise if you're just planting straight into the 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 it does need to be kept evenly moist either through natural rainfall or sprinkling the ground until those seeds have germinated. Particularly, in certain types of soil that are prone to crusting, if you let the soil dry out, it will form an impenetrable layer that the seedlings just can't break through. So keeping the soil moist as they're going through the germination process is important. If you've ever purchased a 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 all at the same time. So I would highly recommend planting just a fraction of that seed packet and making successive plantings. 

So put in one short row or a small block now, one week, two weeks, three weeks later, put in another equivalent planting so that you have spaced out harvest rather than having to have a 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 head-farming types, then you're going to need to space them appropriately. And this, if you've seeded them in the ground in a row, means you're going to have to take out a lot of the little ones in between. Those can be eaten. 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 required for that variety. 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 take as much room between plants because they don't spread out as much as the head-forming ones. Lettuce doesn't put down deep roots. 

So as you're cultivating to keep those weeds out of the picture, be cognizant of that. You don't want to be scratching up the soil surface so much that it damages the roots. You can mulch around the plants to help conserve moisture, but you want to wait until the plants are big enough so that you can actually work around them so they don't get buried in that organic mulch. So, in the heat of the summer, so when temperatures are warm, and we have a combination of warmth and long days, lettuce tends to go to seed or it bolts. That makes it a little bit harder to grow lettuce in the summer in Wisconsin. Not impossible but more difficult. If you can keep temperatures cooler by planting it in shadier conditions, that may help you get a crop through. There are some varieties that are more resistant to bolting, oftentimes called summer lettuces or something like that, that can be used during the heat of the summer. With most of the lettuce varieties, they're going to do best when weather's cool. That means spring and fall. 

But we can extend that planting season through the summer by taking advantage of different varieties, harvesting earlier before the plant has had a chance to go through the process of going to seed. So we want to avoid plants growing too long because both over-maturity and heat contribute to that bitter flavor that you oftentimes experience with lettuce. We get the most fabulous taste in early spring or in the fall because you have nice, succulent lettuce that's being frosted off. It's going to be a lot sweeter and more tender than plants that have been grown during the heat of the summer or plants that have been left in the ground too long. One thing that's nice about lettuce is that it grows quickly and can fill in an are rapidly, be harvested and then allow for other plants to grow in. So you can try intercropping lettuce between other larger plants that will be put in later or take a long time to develop. So some of our warm season crops, like tomatoes or peppers, they start out pretty small. You have lots of space between them to plant a crop of lettuce and get it out of the ground by the time those other plants have spread to fill in that space. So particularly if you are constrained in your planting area, that's a great way to get a couple of crops in the same space in that interplanting. Now, as I alluded to earlier, you don't have to wait for lettuce to form a head in order to eat it. 

It can be harvested pretty much any time. So we can look at the different categories here of these different stages when greens are harvested, and they're calling seedlings that are being cut off as microgreens. Still very small, just one or two leaves. That's probably not a highly efficient use of your time unless you want to be seeding these things over and over again. 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 for your baby greens, and that's oftentimes what you'll get as bagged salad greens are these plants that have been growing just maybe a month, six weeks, something like that. With some of these plants, if you don't cut them all the way to the ground and leave a little nubbin of the crown, they will regenerate. So you can be snipping off the entire plant and wait for the next set of leaves to grow out of it. Another way to harvest these are to just cut individual leaves after the plants have gotten a little bit bigger. So taking them off from around the edges. So you get to eat part of the plant, leaving the rest to grow and develop more leaves as you go. 

But if you do want that nice, perfect head, then you're going to have to wait. You might be able to pick a few leaves off the exterior of the plant as it's growing, but you're usually going to look at the seed packet to guess about when, how many weeks, how many days from planting it should be mature. And then you're going to be cutting that entire plant off at ground level or pulling it up out of the ground. It's possible to get some regeneration if you leave the roots in the ground. Oftentimes those heads are going to be much smaller. Sometimes they don't form a nice compact head, but you will get some more leaves. So if you don't want to make successive plantings, you can harvest in expecting the plant to regrow again for you. In lieu of these successive plantings, you get successive harvests. 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, most of which are cool season plants that you can plant at the same time as lettuce. 

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 crop. People say it's like spinach. Personally, I do not find the taste very similar to spinach, and I don't find it a 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 you can put in early in the season. Some of them, like the Swiss chard, will last throughout the season, and even as large plants, you can continue growing them. Even if we would typically be using those leaves in the smaller stage for salads, they can be used for other things. Arugula is one of my favorites. It commands great prices at the farmers' market and in the grocery store. 

It is just as easy as lettuce to grow. Throw some seeds in the ground, and within a few weeks, you have harvestable leaves. This has a rather bold or peppery taste. Some people aren't fond of that, so you might want to sample it before you decide to plant your entire garden in Arugula, but I find it, if I put it in early enough, the plant will go to flower but the flowers are edible and it will self-seed in my garden. So I typically put in just a spring planting that will then self-seed for a fall harvest as well. 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 become deeply indented. I like the strong flavor so I don't have a problem eating the older leaves, the flowers, and things like that, but if you're not as fond of the flavor, then you might want to stick with the younger, more juvenile foliage that isn't' quite as strong. But I would highly recommend trying this because it's a very easy crop. 

Spinach is another one that's fairly easy. It has a little more difficult time with germination. The germination tends to be more lengthy, overall, for the seeds to germinate than lettuce and a 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, and I've actually had some spinach over winter in my garden lightly covered and mulched, and then you get a wonderful crop early in the season. In fact, one year I covered it up in November and uncovered it as New Year's for a New Year's Eve salad fresh from the garden which is a little bit tricky to do here in Wisconsin. So these tend to be slow to emerge in the spring, and, once again, just like with lettuce, you need to be concerned about competition from weeds, but, basically, the culture is pretty much like lettuce. Harvesting is very similar to lettuce. You can harvest individual leaves, you can wait for the entire thing to form, but spinach does tend to go to seed much more regularly than the lettuce would, regardless of variety. 

So it's best grown as a spring crop and then later sown in mid-August for fall harvest crop. It really just does not do well in the summer. Now, I really don't have time to get into growing all the other wonderful vegetables that you could be putting into your salad. Radish and carrots are also cool season plants that can be direct seeded in the garden. 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 something that you can harvest that kids don't have to wait around for a long, long time. It's not immediate satisfaction but pretty close. Cucumber, tomatoes are warm season crops that are more complicated to grow just because of our cool growing season. 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, resort to starting these things  early, purchasing seedlings to transplant in the garden, and so that involves a lot more work than many of these cool season 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 about planting these vegetables, whatever they may be, in the ground to growing them in containers. So why would that even be necessary? What if you lived in an apartment and only have a balcony? 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 resort to planting your crops in a container. Growing vegetables in containers really isn't all that much different than growing them in the ground other than a few considerations that they're going to need more care in terms of water and nutrients because with the smaller root space those resources get exhausted 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 really cold in the spring. So you could be starting things in containers right now if you wanted if you had decent light to be able to either move 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 right selection of varieties. I think most people are aware that there's a great range of sizes of tomatoes, and there's also a range in the size of tomato plants. And so if you have a small container and put a huge tomato in it,that's not going to be a very good combination. 

So you want to think about getting patio varieties or things that have been developed to grow in smaller spaces, specifically for growing in containers because those plants will perform much better under those conditions than if you just pick something that you like. It's possible, if you're using a half whiskey barrel, you probably could grow any type of tomato cultivar in there, but if you have limited space and small containers, then you really want to be considering the ultimate 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 apparatus that have been so 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 up and toward the light, and why should you make them grow down and then back up? Some people swear by these saying that oh, yes, it provides much better yield, I can water them easily, and if that's the case, fine. There's nothing wrong with them, but your traditional container where the plants are growing out the top are just as good. And you don't need to have anything really fancy to grow your lettuce in. So I have an example here. It's illustrated on the lower left on the slide, but I also have the same container here with my little box of lettuce. 

And this is nothing more than an old clementine box that I've lined with landscape fabric to keep the growing medium from falling through the cracks. And I have a nice crop of lettuce growing here. Now, admittedly, I have access to a greenhouse at the university... [LAUGHTER] 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 year just because we have such short days and low light. But if you're highly motivated and have some grow lights, you can accomplish something similar. And if you're starting to seed your lettuce plants now, you're going to have much better results as our day length is increasing and the intensity of the sun is increasing. So this is something that's really fun to do. I have a mixture of different things in here. Unfortunately, all of the red varieties haven't colored up yet in here, so it doesn't look particularly spectacular in color, 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. Plants other than water plants don't like to sit in water. They need good drainage for the roots. The roots need oxygen, and so that's the most important thing to provide plants is good drainage. So even if you're using an old coffee can, if you poke enough holes in the bottom so the water will come out, that is a suitable container for growing 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 tin washtub that a friend of mine has sitting on a couple of sawhorses and planks on her driveway because she has no sun in her otherwise tree-covered lot. 

And she has a wonderful garden there. I had a question in the 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 or are they good? They're probably just fine. I'm not actually familiar with that product specifically, but a lot of these containerized gardens, let's say, provide you with everything you need. 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 containing the growing medium, whether that's soil or a soil-less mix, and what it looks like is really up to you, ornamental or not. It can be as, I don't know if you consider the tangerine box ugly, but maybe not as decorative as it could be, but it's perfectly functional and is growing a perfectly decent crop of lettuce. So I think anything will work. The salad box or the salad table is a product that the Master 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. You fill that with a growing medium and add a couple handles on it to make it more portable, easier to move around. And the table is essentially the same box but with legs on it. And so they're really promoting that as a way to get people to grow stuff. So if you've got a little scrap lumber, preferably not treated because we don't want to have to be dealing with the chemicals that are used in the treatment process to help preserve the wood, we don't want those leaching into the vegetables you're going to be eating, but it's something that would be very easy to construct. You can go get your husbands out there, get your kids, get the 4H students to help you build one of these things, and you can be utilizing this if you want a nice compact way to grow lettuce in your salad box. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> The website, I will read that off because the letters are a little bit small. Www.growit.umd.edu and then salad and because they left 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? /index. 

Otherwise, I'd suggest just Googling salad box Maryland. [LAUGHTER] Probably going to be 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 having smaller gardens. You want it all but you think you don't have space for both your traditional vegetable garden and ornamental garden. Well, you don't have to put vegetables in rows. And you don't have to have them all by themselves out in the back 40. You can, as long as you have the appropriate soil and light conditions, mix them in with your other pretty plants. One thing that you do have to consider if you're trying to incorporate vegetables that you're going to be harvesting with ornamentals is how you're going to deal with what's left after you harvest. 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 that lettuce plant out of there. Like I mentioned before with intercropping with other larger, later growing plants, you might be 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 challenging if you're growing 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 works out right. So many of the things that we've been talking about are very 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 either in gardens or in containers is pretty easy. Both of these illustrations are from Olbrich Botanic Gardens here in Madison. So they do a fabulous job of integrating spring flowers and lettuce and other leafy greens in the early season. They also have a spectacular vegetable garden that, from a 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 lettuce as an ornamental, mixing it with annuals is very easy. 

In this case, it's probably better to go ahead and start your lettuce, get them up to a small size, and then transplant them into place just so that you can position them more carefully than if you were trying to self-seed them and you're not sure whether they're actually going to germinate in that location. 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 the bulb foliage to ripen and replace that pot with something new and more interesting. I've grown them in my garden as a border. So the red little cones on the front of that planting on the left of the slide are the variety 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 years, and every spring I just go through and reposition those things so that they're spaced appropriately to form a border or something else. And I don't even bother to harvest them because I have enough lettuce growing elsewhere, but just leave them to form this border and eventually they will go to seed, forming these very interesting cones that people are always anxious to know what is that really cool plant there. 

Well, that's just the lettuce going to seed. [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 things, and there are a lot of other plants like this that are very good for edging. Many of our herbs, like parsley, is very ornamental. Parsley is particularly nice for incorporating into edible plantings because you're not harvesting the entire plant generally, just picking a few leaves here or there. And so it's very easy to incorporate without ending up 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 getting the light to shine through the leaves and the petioles, that may be morning, that may be evening depending on what you work schedule is and when you're planning to be out in the garden. They can really be spectacular with the light filtering through. There's a nice variety called bright lights which offers a range of colors of the petioles from white, yellow, cream, orange, pink, and red, and put a bunch of those in. 

What I typically do is seed them in one area, wait until I see what the colors are, and then 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 or the kales, are to select varieties that have dark colored leaves, so reddish purple, and that provides a lot of foliar interest because it's very 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 plants in an ornamental setting so that you can have the best of both worlds. So I would encourage you to experiment. Try some of these things and enjoy your salad. [APPLAUSE] It looks like we have lots of questions over here. >> [INAUDIBLE] Can you speak to the question of good potting mixture? If you plant in a seedless mixture, can your lettuce actually grow in that medium? >> In a soil-less mixture you mean? >> Yes. >> And typically for growing in containers, we do not recommend using garden soil because it tends to be very heavy, will compact, and doesn't promote good drainage as well as having 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 the market, Miracle-Gro has one, Fafard is another. 

Most of these are based on peat moss or pine bark or something else that doesn't actually have any soil in it. When you're growing in a container, particularly if you're using soil-less medium 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. Whether that's organic or synthetic, that really doesn't matter. That's entirely up to you. So it's preferable to use a soil-less medium for growing plants, but you need to remember that it does not have all the nutrients that the plant will need over the entire growing season and you'll need to be providing that supplementally.  >> When can we start the plants indoors if we don't have a 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 small space, so you could even do that on a window sill. We probably will be able to start planting lettuce outside, at least in the Madison area, let's say early April. So count backwards four to six weeks and that would be about when you would want to start the seedlings for transplanting out. If you just want to be able to put them in a container, that provides a lot more flexibility because you could be moving them out on nice days and then bringing them back inside when it's going to be too cold for them so that you can get a little bit of a jump on the season. 

You potentially could be starting to grow them now. If you don't have grow lights or good light, you're going to end up with a more straggly plant than you might otherwise. So it's something to consider and it's hard for me to make a specific recommendation without knowing your specific conditions. But those are all things to keep in mind. How much light you have, can you grow any plants in your house? If you can't even grow some of the tropicals that require low light, then lettuce probably isn't a good thing to be trying to start now if you can't provide some supplemental light. But by April you should be able to be seeding these things outside. If you start them now, you could be transplanting things out at that point. If you are starting any plants indoors, lettuce or otherwise, it's very important to acclimate those plants from the cushy environment of the indoors to much harsher conditions that they'll be experiencing outside. So instead of saying it's the first beautiful day of spring, I'm going to go stick everything out in the garden, resist the urge to do that and make sure that you've been moving your plants out daily into a more protected location, bringing them at night so they gradually 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 week or two before putting them out in the garden, otherwise they will suffer a setback and take longer to get established. >> Tricks in dealing with rabbits? >> Get a cat. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, rabbits are a 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 only solution then.  Other questions?  >> I was just wondering if you could your website back up for information for us. 

>> There it is. >> Thank you. >> Well, if there are no other questions, thank you for coming. [APPLAUSE]