Growing the Perfect Salad & Making the Best Dressing
Salad is a food that likely all of us have eaten. I like to think of it as a “carrier food” for delicious dressings!
The heartier greens like kale, collards, arugula, spinach, etc get a rep for being nutritional powerhouses.
We can’t get enough spinach!
Salad greens aka lettuce aren’t quite in the same ilk as these champions, but they do boast plenty of fiber, antioxidants, minerals and vitamins while being more mild in flavor...
In this article, we’ll talk a bit about how to grow the best salad greens and create a delightful and versatile dressing to make eating it irresistible!!
Salad is incredibly easy to grow, it just needs a few things:
- Water: salad likes abundant watering (not drowned however!)
- Grows best with natural sunlight & mildly amended soil (add a little compost)
- Prefers cold temps (will bolt or go to seed quickly in heat) so grow in spring or fall for best results
Sowing
You can seed densely or pick the little seeds out one by one and give them 6 in spacing for lettuce head development. We choose to sow the seed in a large patch for baby greens. We don’t get heads this way, but come by with scissors or a sharp knife to get many harvests from the same patch. Lettuce will continue to grow if you don’t pull it up.
Harvest
To harvest, cut a couple inches above the base and leave a few leaves if you’re wanting to come back and harvest again. Salad is best eaten chilled or immediately and will last longer if you harvest in the morning. It also won’t be as bitter. Salad grown in warmer temps may also take on a bitter quality.
The lettuce we grew this spring is called Black Seeded Simpson and this is a very easy Buttercrunch variety to start with.
Now that you’ve harvested, rinse if desired and pat, shake dry or use a salad spinner.
On Making the Best Sauce
Remember, the best sauce is whatever you end up making that day. We’re going to share with you basic guidelines for an incredibly tasty, easy and ever-versatile dressing sure to tingle any taste buds and make you want more!!
The Breakdown
A dressing should be complex in flavor, yet simple to make.
Components
- Fat -olive oil is most common, but sunflower oils, nut butter, seasame oil or any other liquid oil will work well.
- Sour - These may include vinegars, fruit juices, citrus.
- Salt
- Sweet - this is optional, but it rounds out the salad well. Can include honey, maple syrup, agave, etc.
- Any additional desired herbs or seasonings - garlic, chopped herbs, seaweeds, nutritional yeast, etc.
(Optional ingredient is an emulsifier like prepared mustard which will bind the fat and liquid components. Otherwise shake well directly before using.)
With this in mind, we’ll walk you through the way we made it the other day!
Rough Guidelines
We make all our dressings intuitively so we’ll give you the basics and let you run with it from there!
3 parts organic extra virgin olive oil (evoo)
3 parts organic apple cider vinegar (acv)- Wren infused some with aromatic herbs last fall as an added fiesta in the mouth!
1 part organic tamari (you can use soy sauce) - this acts as our Salt
1/2 part honey - more as desired
1/2 part dulse flakes, a nutrient-rich seaweed (or nutritional yeast, black pepper, ground flax, dried herbs, etc)- it’s all up to you; follow your intuition and desire!
We also like to pick fresh herbs that are growing, in this case, fennel, to throw on top. This adds nutrients and incredible flavor!
Make sure to stir the honey in well and shake throughly prior to dressing the lettuce.
Join & Enjoy!
This is a classic dressing that is easy to make and you can infinitely variate ingredients to cater to local, seasonal fare!
What are some of your favorite salad dressings to make at home or varieties of lettuce to grow?
We sowed lettuce in the high tunnel throughout the winter, but now is the prefect time to start sowing outdoors!
Congratulations, your post was discovered and featured by @OCD in its daily compilation 213!
You can follow @ocd – learn more about the project and see other Gems! We strive for transparency.
If you would like your posts to be resteemed by @ocd to reach a bigger audience, use the tag #ocd-resteem. You can read about it here.
@ocd now has a witness. You can vote for @ocd-witness with SteemConnect or on Steemit Witnesses to help support other undervalued authors!
wow u have an impressive grow, i only have a humble balcony grow its about all i can manage, but salad is there, so easy but unfortunately i have a problem with fungus gnats, i just brought some fine mesh pop up covers, im going to harvest everything and change the soil and start a fresh. do u have any tips for conditioning the soil because im only using regular potting mix and small part of organic mix. I dont have a compost system yet, but im looking into how i can make that work in a small flat (i was also thinking about a wormary but as a vegan im feeling its a bit cruel to have worms confined inside a box, my roomie is worried its going to stink) I was looking into growing alfalfa to put some nitrogen in the soil do u think thats a solution. i literally only at beginners learning stage of growing and a bit baffled about the chemistry behind it all.
Glad to hear you have a place to grow something! I don't have experience with fungal gnats but can offer a few tips from my little knowledge.
First I would ask if you Grow sprouts or microgreens. That would be my choice if I were you. Within 2 weeks you can eat greens.
Worms are my choice for small Composting and WONT smell if done right. I respect your cruelty concerns, not sure how to address that. I was vegan 8.5 years and kept worms. They seemed happy to me (they were often procreating) and had good food to eat and got plenty of exercise ;)
As for soil, consider actively aerated compost tea AACT (its like farming bacteria, not sure if thats vegan though...). You could try Diatomaceous earth for gnats. Alfalfa is good N. also for NPK 10:1 diluted urine is a great DIY option (it's not vegan, but you can use your own).
Hope that helps
thank you for your extensive response. Ive looked online that if u are giving the worms a nice environment safe from predators it shouldnt be a vegan problem to have a wormary, but my main concern is that we rent our apartment to holiday makers in the summer approx 2-3 months ( i have to plan all my growing before and after this period- for this micro greens are a good option but i have loads of other seeds i need to use and want to experiment with)
potentially the wormary won’t smell because I can do it right by putting the right foods on it but I can’t expect my holiday guests to continue to look after the worms. I could ask the cleaner to take care of them once a week. Do they need food provided regularly? Like everyday or could once a week be ok?
Also where to put the wormary is an issue i read that the wormary should be away from direct sunlight and heat, it would need to be inside either under my sink as the kitchen tends to be quite cool even on sunny days as no direct sun gets in there, this is again my worry if it starts stinking. Do u have any advice on this matter? Because atm I feel like it isn’t going to work, is urine really the only other option? I think my partner might freak out if he knew I was watering them with urine but I guess its nature ><
thanks again
Bitter greens are great for getting your digestive juices revved up. And according to James Green the bitter action "has a marked antidepressant psychological effect along with a subtle grounding effect on one's consciousness. "
Oooh thanks for adding this. Love the bitters in the spring for the reasons you mentioned 🌿💚 blessings! They are a sorely lacking aspect of the modern diet!
That template for salad dressings is just what I need. I usually just stumble through it adding what I think it needs, but this is a great starting point.
Yay! Yeah it’s bascially fool-proof! Infinite awesome possibilities- glad you found it helpful ✨
Ooh. Hadn’t thought of nutritional yeast in salad dressing. I’ll remember that detail. I am just getting ready to sow our salad seeds. We had a great crop of kale last summer that was so good because we were able to harvest it when the leaves were young.
Nootch as we call it is sooo good in there- if you try it, let me know if ya like it ;)
Awesome to hear of your kale crop and that you’re sowing soon. I Love baby kale! Sometime so fantastic about those tender leaves 😄💚
I grow baby salad greens in an old roaster pan set up in my bedroom window. I plant in strips, about 1/5 of the pan today, another 1/5 a day or two later, etc., etc. This keep a nice rotation so I have enough for a few days, just when I need them.
Each year at the end of summer, I seek out markdown seeds packages, often finding them for $0.10 per pack. I buy all sorts of lettuce seeds and mix them up.
Everything is harvested between 3 and 4 inches high. Cut off the roots and Viola!
Awesome! You’re so cool fernowl! That sounds like the perfect way to do it. Good note, too, on continual sowing so you always have a new crop. We got these seeds too at discount for .10! That’s the way!! Love that you mix and match. Do you have a fav? I haven’t grown lettuce so much (more of a heartier green lover) so I’m curious! 💚🌿
Great info. on salads, along with clear pictures from your fabulous garden.
Gracias!! 💚🙏
@mountainjewel,
This gem of a post was discovered by the @OCD Curator team!
Please Reply to this comment if you accept, and are willing to let us share your gem of a post! By accepting this, you have a chance to receive extra rewards and one of your photos in this article may be used on our compilation post!
You can follow @ocd – learn more about the project and see other Gems! We strive for transparency!
Welcome to the Steem Community @mountainjewel! The salad looks like it would certainly be healthy and delicious!
Please reply to this comment, and I will share your post with the @OCD curator team!
Yes thank you so very much 🙏 I accept 💕
The dressing sounds delicious. I like how you broke down the components of it and made easier for us to understand the right way to make a perfect dressing. This explains why I hate salads because I never prepare the dressing the right way. Thank you for this knowledge <3
Thanks for sharing your salad growing and salad dressing techniques. Lettuce is sometimes hard to grow here, because it bolts when the weather gets hot. I was thinking about growing some in the herb garden outside my kitchen, where there isn't a lot of direct sunlight and heat. Perhaps it will prolong the growing season a bit.