HO-29
YARD AND GARDEN
VEGETABLES FOR SALADS
John A. Wott
Tossed salad! Fresh tomato wedges! Hearts of lettuce! Sliced cucumbers! How everyone loves those crisp garden vegetables. And how much better they usually taste if they come from your own garden. Why? Because they're usually picked fresh.
The basic salad vegetables are lettuce, spinach, endive, cabbage, radishes, cucumbers, onions, chives, tomatoes and peppers. They're all easy to grow. And you don't even need much garden space, since a few plants of each one will provide plenty of fresh salad for the whole family.

Planning
Plan your garden before you plant. Decide which salad vegetables and which varieties you want to grow. Planning helps assure that your garden will fit your wants and needs.
Salad vegetables grow best in an open, level area where the soil is loose, rich and well-drained. Avoid heavy clay or sandy soils and locations near trees and shrubs. If you have walnut trees, keep tomato plants as far from them as possible, for walnut roots produce a toxin which injures tomatoes.
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Make a sketch of your garden, using the space requirements shown in the chart. Keep the early vegetables, such as lettuce and radishes, together. They can then be replaced by later crops. Also consider a fall vegetable garden, since many crops can be planted in the early fall for fresh harvest.
Planting
Many salad vegetables can be planted as soon as the soil can be safely worked in the spring. If you can crumble the soil ball with your fingers, it's ready to plant. If it clings together, it's still too wet. Soil worked too wet will remain hard and cloddy for weeks.
Before working the soil, spread fertilizer over the plot. Two to three pounds of a general analysis fertilizer such as 1 2-12-1 2 per 100 square feet of area is usually sufficient. Leafy crops such as lettuce and endive will benefit from ample application of high nitrogen fertilizers.
Some gardeners prefer to omit or reduce the fertilizer application when working the soil for root or fruit crops such as radishes and tomatoes. Instead, high phosphorus and potassium fertilizers are used to sidedress the plants two to three weeks after planting and monthly thereafter. With these crops, high nitrogen often encourages luscious vegetative growth but little fruit.
After fertilizing, prepare the soil about six inches deep with a garden spade, plow, or rototiller. Be sure that all sod is turned under. If you spade by hand, shatter and slice each shovelful, so the soil is crumbly. Finish by leveling and smoothing with a rake or harrow.
If you are starting from seeds, mark the rows by stretching a heavy cord between stakes at either end of the garden. Furrows for the seed are made by the hoe handle for fine seeds, or by the hoe blade for large seeds. Barely cover small seeds and have only 1 inch of soil over large seeds. Seeds planted too deep often do not come up.
If starting from transplants, mark the rows and dig a hole for each plant roughly twice as wide and twice as deep as the soil ball of the plants. Set the plant slightly deeper than it grew before, add 1 cup of starter solution, and place soil around the roots. Starter solution is made by dissolving 1 tablespoon of water-soluble, high-phosphate fertilizer, such as 10-52-17 or 11 -48-0, in a gallon of water. Finish by filling the hole, leaving a small basin around each plant.