Most of the leaves that you find on the shelves of grocery stores have been treated with synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and pre-emergent herbicides to prevent pest pressure and disease. Not only are all these chemicals bad for you, their use also has major repercussions for our climate and for the farm workers who handle them.

Many consumers are led to believe that there are only a handful of salad greens worth eating. In reality, the greens you find at the store are just the ones that stay fresh longest. They're hardly representative of the hundreds of varieties of lettuce alone you can grow. There are so many different flavors to explore when you grow your own, and you'll enjoy them when they're fresher, better-tasting, and at their nutritional peak.

Plants that we grow for their leaves are the simplest and easiest to grow. That's because leaves are one of the first things a plant produces. We can begin harvesting leaves in a matter of weeks, instead of spending months fertilizing and pruning these plants while we wait for flowers and fruits to form.

Most of our favorite leafy greens don't take up that much space. The root systems of salad greens are small, which means they don't need a large garden to thrive. You can grow a productive salad garden in containers.