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Tag: Lettuce
The 10 easiest fruit and vegetables to grow via @changebehaviour
Fancy creating your own supply of juicy fruits, crunchy vegetables and fresh salad greens? This selection of great foods sprout more-or-less like magic out of the ground—with the minimum of effort. Whether you’ve only a windowsill, garden or balcony, get planting today. Here are ten of the easiest fruit and veg you can grow, with step-by-step instructions from the experts at Garden Organic.
Salad
Lettuce, rocket and other crunchy leaves are easy to grow. Cut them and they keep coming back!
- Super-easy to grow indoors all year around
- Constant harvest – leaves can be picked over and again and they’ll grow back
- Pick’n’ mix your favourite flavours, textures and varieties – peppery rocket, crunchy lettuce, exotic oriental saladini
Complete growing directions
- You can grow salad all year inside. Try mixing different lettuces or adding rocket. Oriental varieties work best for winter use – sow in September and they’ll last you until March.
- Fill a seed tray with compost.
- Toss over about a quarter of a teaspoon of salad seeds.
- Cover with a sprinkling of compost, water it carefully and place it on a sunny windowsill.
- Don’t let it dry out.
- Hint: Try stretching cling film over the top of the tray to keep moisture in. Take it off as soon as seedlings start to appear.
- When the plants are about 3in tall you can start cutting them and they’ll keep growing back again and again.
Alternative method: you can grow salad in 12 inch pot or directly in the soil in your garden.
Watering
- The easiest way to tell if something needs watering is with your finger: poke it into the soil to test.
- If the soil is damp just under the surface, don’t water. If it is dry up to the first crease of your finger then you need to water.
- Seeds and seedlings need care when watering – use a fine-head watering can so you don’t over-water them.
- It is better to water well infrequently than to sprinkle a little every day.
Continue reading “The 10 easiest fruit and vegetables to grow via @changebehaviour”
Foods you can grow from kitchen scraps via Homesteading
Apple: http://bit.ly/92fKNG
Ginger: http://bit.ly/leVit5
Pineapple: http://bit.ly/MGOeFi
Romaine: http://bit.ly/13K9Ghb
Garlic Chives: http://bit.ly/JnNaRc
Garlic Bulbs: http://bit.ly/YAJRgi
Onion: http://bit.ly/bSewVO
Basil: http://exm.nr/LZNNFU
Peppers: http://bit.ly/Mxtl8
Sweet Potatoes: http://bit.ly/10QT4ch
Pumpkin: http://bit.ly/WxJM12
Celery: http://bit.ly/yisbpy
Avocado: http://bit.ly/2GtmTp
How to Wash, Dry, and Store Lettuce
So this is how I wash, dry and store my lettuce so that it is fresh and ready for salad whenever I need it! I use this method for all types of lettuce (except iceberg, see the end of this post for information about cleaning and storing iceberg lettuce) and it also works for other types of greens and hearty herbs such as parsley.
1. Fill a sink* with cold water, separate all the leaves of lettuce, place them in the water and swirl them around. If the lettuce is a bit limp, let it soak in the water for 30 minutes and it will miraculously come back to life.
2. Drain the water, turn on the faucet, and briefly rinse* each piece of lettuce as you remove it from sink and place in the basket of your salad spinner. If you use organic lettuce, just give each piece a quick once-over to check for clinging bugs and dirt. As you put the lettuce in the spinner, you can tear the leaves in half if they are large (such as full-size romaine).
3. When the spinner is full but not tightly packed, spin the lettuce until dry.
4. Spread two paper towels (still connected) on the counter and pile the dry lettuce in the middle. Wrap the paper towels around the lettuce and slide into a gallon-size zippered plastic bag. Squeeze the air out and close the bag.
5. The lettuce can now be stored in the fridge and should stay fresh for at least a couple of weeks. You can take out what you need whenever you want to make a salad or sandwich and then just reseal the bag. The plastic bags can also be reused!
*My advice would be: instead of filling the sink with cold water and then draining it afterwards, why not filling a big bowl and then reuse it watering the plants, and when is time to rinse each leaf directly with the water running from the faucet, let the water run into the bowl (the same or another) in order to not wasting water and reusing it for something else, as I said, watering the plants may be a good option.
Find the full original article here, gives a lot of other tips including salad additions and dressings, totally worth it.
ecogreenlove 