Growing a salad bowl garden in Hendersonville, North Carolina is not only fun, but healthy. It’s healthy both in the sense that gardening is a form of exercise and healthy to eat the finished product. It also doesn’t take much space to create an amazing amount of produce. Because a salad uses both cool and warm season crops, the gardener can garden year round. This is good news in a place like Hendersonville, which has hot summers that tomatoes love and cool winters that are just the thing for lettuce and salad greens.
The Benefits of Salad Bowl Gardening
Besides exercise, the benefits of salad bowl garden are saving tons of money on produce, which can sometimes be surprisingly expensive. A gardener also knows exactly what has been used in the garden and doesn’t have to worry about any food chemicals being in the salad. Moreover, since the garden will probably produce a surplus, the veggies can be shared with friends and neighbors.
Supplies Needed
Some people go all out for supplies, but it’s not necessary. All a gardener needs for a salad bowl garden are:
- Topsoil
- A spade for turning over the earth
- Irrigation
- Pruners to snip off old leaves as well as ripe fruit
- A garden knife to harvest lettuce leaves
- A hoe to keep down the weeds
How to Grow a Container Salad Garden
The best way to grow a salad bowl garden is in a container that is capable of holding topsoil and plants/salad greens. Ideally, cool weather crops should be planted in the fall or very early spring. They can be started from seed and placed in rows according to the instructions on the packet. Lettuce should be ready to harvest in about 60 days. It can be cut off close to the ground with a gardening knife and will grow back.
Warm season crops like tomatoes and cucumbers can be started indoors during the winter and transplanted into the garden after all danger of frost is past. The plants may need to be hardened off or placed outside for a limited amount of time each day until they can be outside all night. Tomatoes will mature in 55 to 90 days and cucumbers in 22 to 52 days.
Some herbs can also be started indoors. These include basil. Other herbs should be sown straight into the earth. These herbs include dill, which has a long tap root. The good thing about herbs is that many of them are perennial and can tolerate Hendersonville’s winters.
All of the vegetables and herbs for the salad bowl gardens should be grown in full sunlight. They also shouldn’t be over-watered. A plant that’s watered too much doesn’t develop the deep root system it needs to be as healthy as it can be. Some gardeners throw in some fertilizer in the hole for the seeds or transplants. But the best time to fertilize the plant is when it’s putting forth flowers. During the hot weather, plants also appreciate mulch to keep their roots cool.
Having a Container Salad Garden at Your Hendersonville Home
A well-tended salad bowl garden will not only provide healthy things to eat, but will give the gardener a sense of pride in his or her accomplishments. To find a home perfect for growing a container salad garden in Hendersonville, search our available listings:
