Gardening: Cool Weather Needed To Grow Salad Gardens

These mixes are very convenient and they can add some mystique to your humdrum salad diet. The first time my spouse served the new salad, I felt like a first-year botany student as I dissected it and tried to identify its several components. Since we started using mixed salads, I've learned to love and respect radicchio, endive and sometimes spinach in my green salads.
Radicchio, (Cichorium intybus), is a member of the chicory family, which includes endive and the old European favorite, Witloof chicory, which is also known as Belgian endive. These salad vegetables have been staples in European diets for many centuries, and layered dress since the 1980s they have gained popularity here in the United States.
When I first spotted the radicchio in the salad mix, I thought it was shredded red cabbage. Until you do a taste test, you would probably think the same thing. Radicchio doesn't taste like lettuce, and has a very mild, slightly bitter flavor. When most people eat the other chicory family members, they usually use a sweet dressing, but with radicchio, this is absolutely unnecessary.
Several years ago, I thought it would be challenging and fun to raise my radicchio in my vegetable garden. I ordered some seeds, amended the soil and planted my radicchio. Radicchio requires a cool growing season, so if you choose to grow from seeds, you should sow them directly into your vegetable garden in early November through January.
If the soil is too warm, radicchio seeds will not sprout. Cover seeds lightly with just a sprinkling of fine garden or seed starting soil. Seeds will sprout in 7-14 days. Side-dress the rows with 6-6-6 granular fertilizer every month.
You should start indoor transplants four to six weeks before you want to set the seedlings in your garden. When transplanting the seedlings, plant the smaller varieties about 6-inches apart and the larger ones about 8-inches, with two feet between rows. Keep the radicchio bed well irrigated, fertilized, and weed-free. If you direct seed, thin out the plants to the recommended spacing and use the tender pullouts in the luncheon salad. Try it, and I think you'll love it.
Spinach is one of my favorite cooked vegetables. It has never done for me what it does for the cartoon character, Popeye, but I like it, anyway. As a raw salad component, it is superb.
Spinach requires cool growing weather, lots of moisture, and army dress up very rich soil. I would till copious amounts of Black Kow composted cow manure into the spinach bed. Black Kow is readily available at local box store garden nurseries.
Next, I'd thoroughly saturate the planting area with water, soak the seeds overnight in tepid water, and fancy dress clapham junction in the morning I'd plant my spinach. The seeds will sprout in about 10 days. Keep the bed moist and in about 35 to 40 days, you should be eating from your spinach patch. Cooked or raw, spinach is superb. It's good for you, too.
Most of us know how to grow tomatoes, peppers, carrots, scallions and other salad components, so I won't say too much about them at this time. Salad gardens produce nutritious food, they grow fast,they are great fun.
So, plant your salad garden now, because we don't get much cool weather in SW Florida.
Happy garden paths to you.


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