Fresh local food! We all know it’s best for us, best for our farmers and communities and best for our planet. Best of all, it tastes amazing.
In our high-tech internet, information age, where research-based evidence for improving nutrition & health is coming at us fast and furious, sometimes I need to just keep it simple and get back to the basics. I change into my grubbies, round up my kids and their boots, head outside and find a patch of dirt. I stick with what I know, and get down to it.
It’s planting season friends. Go plant something to eat!
Salad greens are the absolute simplest place to start if you don’t have the space for a veggie garden. They can be grown in a very shallow container, don’t need full sun, grow fast and taste like summer!
Find something you have already: a few pottery pots, wooden crates, old buckets or old planting pots. Or get creative and use old gumboots, workbooks, wheelbarrows or baskets…the possibilities are endless! Any soil-holding container will work!
If you have any access to semi-decent dirt in your own yard, go ahead and use that. You can amend it with some nutrients or compost as the summer progresses. But if you have the budget for it, the easiest way to get results is to buy a $4 bag of organic potting soil at your local gardening centre or grocery store. Pick up a packet or two of mixed salad lettuces and you are set with a very minimal investment.
1) Insert soil into container. Add water until its nice and moist and spongey to the touch.
2) Sprinkle seeds on the surface. Space them every inch or so apart. Gently press them in, and cover sprinkle over another small trowel full of soil (so they’re just barely covered.)
3) Done!
Honestly, it’s this easy. Keep the soil moist but not soggy, and only in direct sun for a few hours a day so they don’t dry out.
In a couple weeks you’ll have baby greens. Break off or snip a handful of leaves as you want them. As you eat the baby greens, keep a few plants in to grow to full size heads, adding new seeds as you pull up the old babies.
Have fun growing something this year!
Laundry Mom~Kali ♥
