When you buy spring mix or spinach at the store, your leaves have probably been treated with pre-emergent herbicides to prevent pests and disease; they've been cut and tossed into a non-reusable plastic bag or box, and trucked hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from California or Arizona. By the time you open your leafy greens to enjoy them, they might have been sitting on the shelf for days.
By growing our own salads when possible, we can do our small part for the planet and end up with fresher and better-tasting food.
Salad is one of the simplest things to grow in your own space. The root systems are small, so they don't need a large garden to thrive; in fact, you can even create your own productive salad garden in containers. Salad greens are mostly "cut and come again", which means you can literally cut from them and then come back again and again the next week.
For many of us, growing salad greens 12 months out of the year is not possible. However, most of us have Cool Seasons during which we can grow our own spinach, lettuce plants, cabbage, and more, and we all can be growing arugula the majority of the year.
Here's a bit on how we can help the planet by going zero waste with our salad gardens.
growing your own salad means no plastic packaging
We all know the world has a major plastic problem. According to Plastic Oceans International, we've produced more plastic over the last ten years than during the entire 20th century. Most of the plastic we consume has a very short "working life", during which it serves a function such as containing our food, before spending 1,000 years breaking down in a landfill.
When you grow your own lettuce greens, you skip the single-use plastics. You can bring a colander out to your garden, snip some leaves, and bring them inside to enjoy right away or save in a reusable container. If enough of us did this as many months of the year as possible, the food industry would have to reduce the number of plastic bags and boxes created and shipped to stores.
growing your own salad means less trucking
Most of the leafy greens you see on grocery store shelves are grown in only two places in the United States: the Salinas Valley in California and Yuma Valley in Arizona. Unless you live right next to those valleys, your food has traveled a long way to be made readily available to you. Eating produce sourced locally or from your very own kitchen garden means less fuel consumption and less environmental strain on the planet.
In the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, she writes, "If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week."
If we all grew a little bit of our salad greens when our seasons allowed, the food industry would reduce its trucking miles to reflect decreasing demand.
growing your own salad means less spoiled food
Those tender lettuce leaves don't stand up to days of trucking and refrigeration very well. How many times have you opened a bag of store-bought lettuce to find it's already dark and slimy? Every bag we have to throw away adds up. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the average American family tosses about $1,600 worth of food each year.
When you grow your own lettuce, you can come outside and harvest only as many leaves as you need. Leaves left on the plant can be cut later, without fear of spoiling and leaking green ooze into your refrigerator's produce drawer (because who needs that?).
growing your own salad creates a zero-waste system
By growing a little bit of our own food, especially something as easy to grow and harvest as salad, we can significantly reduce the negative impact of our food on our planet. Right now, the food industry has created a long chain of wastefulness to meet our demand for baby spinach leaves and perfect heads of cabbage. We can break that chain and reduce the number of pesticides on our food, single-use plastics, and food miles.
In addition to helping our struggling planet, we also limit our exposure to growing threats like E-coli and salmonella, not to mention herbicides and pesticides, on our foods.
And the best part is, we end up with fresher and tastier foods. Our very own organic and gourmet salads.
At the end of the season, we can throw our salad garden onto the compost pile and complete this zero-waste system, all while creating nutrient-dense compost to use on our next season of plant babies.
Less fuel consumption, less packing, less waste overall can have so many positive changes on our communities and our planet. This is the way we can change the world for the better—incremental adjustments and switches in our everyday lives. If each of us commits to growing a little bit of our own food, we can make a huge difference. Plus, every bite of homegrown greens will taste so much better.
Don't grow your salad garden alone. We have all the resources you need to help you get started doing your small part to help our planet.
What to grow
Explore our top ten salad greens to grow this fall to help you get started.
Where to grow it
Follow our simple steps to create a salad box in your own backyard, or learn how to create a salad garden in a simple container or pot.
How to care for it
For more how-to's and ideas to set up a salad garden in your own space, download our Salad Garden Guide.
Happy salad growing!
Salad Garden Guide Ebook
In this ebook, you'll learn the step by step for every part of developing and growing (and troubleshooting) your own organic salad garden in a raised bed or other container.