It can be a little scary when you first start growing vegetables and herbs. Seed catalogues have a bewildering array of choice. Gardening is also a slow pursuit where results come after a long process of care, love and attention.

For anyone living in a city that transition from deadlines and instant gratification to waiting around for a plate of food can be terribly frustrating.

There are projects that you can do right here and right now and you’ll have tasty vegetables in a very short time.

Lettuce Begin

Cut and come again salad leaves are a quick and easy way to start gardening in a small space. There’s a world of difference between leaves that you grow yourself and the limp, watery and over-priced bags in the supermarket.

All you need are the following:

  • a wooden vegetable box
  • some potting compost
  • cut and come again seeds
  • newspaper

You can have as much fun as you like with the wooden vegetable box. Paint it, collage it, or decorate it with Sharpies – be as wild or as restrained as you like.

You’ll need to put a couple of layers of newspaper in the bottom of the box so that the potting compost doesn’t fall through the slats. Make sure that they cover the entire bottom and go up the sides a little way.

Then fill your box to about the halfway point with potting compost and water thoroughly. You need to water before you sow the seeds, as leaf seeds are microscopic in size. If you water them after you sow, you run the risk of washing them out to the sides of the box.

You’re aiming for a moist box of soil. Once the soil has drained off a bit, take a handful of leaf seeds and scatter them over the surface of the compost as evenly as you can.

Then take another handful of fresh compost and gently sprinkle that over the seeds. Seeds are little energy stores which react to water and light and swell up to produce a shoot. When you sow seeds, you should plant them to a depth of two and a half times the seed.

If you sow the seeds too deep, they run out of energy before they hit the surface and you won’t have any plants. As your leaf seeds are so tiny, you’re aiming for a light dusting of compost almost like icing sugar on a cake.

Care for Your New Plants

Give the new seeds a good sprinkling of water every other day so that they don’t dry out, and put them out of direct, harsh sunlight. After about two weeks, you’ll have a crop of salad leaves. The beauty of cut and come again is that cutting stimulates new growth. For every box of salad leaves, you should have up to three or four crops.

To ensure that you have a steady supply of leaves, plant the next box about two weeks after the first. I like to have three boxes on the go at the same time, staggering them by two-week intervals. This is “succession planting”.

That’s all there is to it! For the price of one bag of supermarket salad, you’ll have leaves all through the summer.