It’s easy to grow your own “salad bowl.” Lettuce, radishes, tomatoes and other salad ingredients can be grown in containers in your backyard or on your patio. Add in a hard-boiled egg and olives and you have a healthy, delicious salad.  Lettuce  Lettuce is a cool weather crop usually p lanted in the Santa Clarita Valley in the fall through early spring. However, you can grow lettuce all year if you plant heat-tolerant varieties such as New Red Fire and Batavian and offer the plants shade during the hottest of days.  Most lettuce varieties prefer a sandy, loamy soil, not a type of soil native to the SCV which is mostly heavy with clay.  Plant lettuce in raised beds or containers which makes finding good soil easy. Purchase bags of container or raised bed soil at any big box store with a garden center and you are set. Try adding good quality organic compost to your beds as well. Invest in a backyard compost bin to make your own.  Because food waste is now required to be recycled in the SCV instead of tossing your compostables into the recycle bin, simply toss into your own compost bin. No meat or grease should be included but grass clippings make great compost with lost of nitrogen for hungry plants.  Raised beds are available for purchase or can be easily constructed.  You might not want to try growing heads of iceberg lettuce, but many varieties, especially romaine and butter lettuce, are more heat-tolerant, and some are ready to harvest in just weeks.  Most lettuce seeds are teeny, tiny and hard to plant well in rows. It is best to scatter them over the top of your container soil, then add a very fine layer of compost or soil over the top, no more than 1/4 inch deep. You can also just “press” the seeds into the wet soil.  It is best to soak your soil (make sure it is well drained) before planting then “mist” the planted seeds so they are moist, but not floating in pools of water.  If you are planting seeds into a ground level garden bed that may attract weeds, it is best to plant your lettuce in rows to make it easier to root out the stray weeds that may emerge. Many varieties of lettuce can look like weeds and vice versa.  Most importantly, sow your seeds a week apart, you don’t want to plant all your seeds at the same time, you will want to have fresh lettuce for months so plant new seeds every week so all of your plants are not ready to harvest at the same time.  The best seeds for the SCV may not be available in the standard seed display at a big box store, but can be ordered online.  Look for seeds which say “slow to bolt.” Bolting happens when plants get too hot and immediately grow flower stalks and produce seeds, preventing the plant from entering the “harvest” stage.  Good varieties of lettuce to try include Jericho Romaine, Kagraner Sommer, Magenta, Muir and Upland Cress.  Many people prefer to plant lettuce starts available at garden centers or they start their lettuce indoors where they can control the temperature. I have found a low success rate in transplanting the starts, but it is a method that is very successful for many gardeners.  Spinach, Kale, Greens  You don’t just need to purchase kale, beet or mustard greens and a variety of other “spring salad mix” plants. You can grow your own gourmet salad that will taste better and fresher than what you can order in a restaurant.  Kale is easy to plant, and grows beautifully in both raised beds and containers.  Look for mixed seed packages like “California Spicy Greens” which includes Arugula, Curly Endive, Mizuna and Red Mustard.  Tomatoes  Tomatoes are a salad staple. You can successfully grow tomatoes on your patio in a container. It is best to buy plant starts during the spring at any garden center. Focus on cherry tomatoes, which are faster-growing and perfect for salads.  Varieties include Sungold and Early Darling.  There are also varieties of cherry tomatoes you can grow inside.  Cucumbers  Cucumbers are always my favorite part of any salad, however, they are also the most difficult to grow in the SCV because of their insatiable demand for water and space. You will need to devote an entire large raised bed to grow a healthy supply of cucumbers, and most likely won’t see any at all for three months.  Surprisingly, the best growing cucumbers I have found are the ones designed for pickle canning. They are usually small, somewhat misshapen and hard to peel, but are delicious in salads.  The problem with cucumbers is if they don’t like the amount of water, the amount of sunlight or the type of soil, they often are bitter.  The best varieties for the SCV that are never bitter are Green Fingers, Summer Dance and Sweet Slice, varieties you’ll most likely have to buy from an online seed store.  Carrots  I have always enjoyed diced or shredded carrots in my salad. Carrots are among the most forgiving veggies to grow. They do need deep, soft, sandy loam to grow well. They want soil that will allow them to flesh out underground, but as long as they are watered regularly, they don’t usually cause much garden drama.  For container gardening plant the “short, stubby” varieties of carrots. Varieties include chantneys and anything labeled “short stuff.”   The post Grow Your Own Salad Bowl  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal. ...read more read less