Time for a Salad!

I don't know about the rest of you, but I am like to know where my food comes from; especially my vegetables.  I also like to be frugal about my food bill.  So it was only natural that I started growing my own vegetables. 

We love a fresh salad, but bag salads are really expensive.  Especially, if your family is like mine, the bag is almost always never finished and part of it is thrown away!  I had grown fresh salad a few years ago and we loved it!  We just went outside and picked just what we needed for that meal.  What we picked, would grow back in a few weeks.  But I had direct seeded those greens in my garden.  This time I wanted to do something different; something that I could bring indoor when the weather got bad this fall.

After buying a bag of good potting soil, mixed green seed, spinach seed, and liquid fertilizer, I decided to plant my salad in a container that I had on my back patio.  I chose this container because in the area I live in, mixed greens do great in the spring, but struggle in the hot, humid summer.  In this container, I can find a good shady, cool spot that would be a better environment for my greens to make it this summer.  Then, when the weather gets too cool, I can move my container to a more protected area.  Here are the step I took to get my salad garden started growing.

 I placed a old bag of sand in the bottom of my container.

I then placed my potting soil in the container.

Then my trusty helper, Knox, came along and spread the mixed greens in 2/3 of the container.

Knox then covered up our seeds.  He then planted the spinach in the last 1/3 of the container.

We finished up by watering in our seed with a good liquid fertilizer.

Our salad should be shooting up from the soil in about seven days.  We will just have to keep the chickens out of the container!

Let me know if you have done some creative gardening of your own!
I'll be sharing my recipe for homemade salad dressing soon!