Last night we ate deck salad. We ate some the night before, too. It’s rather good, this deck salad, even though its name brings to mind sweaty folks cleaning off the deck of a ship. This is my latest experiment in small-space gardening, and it’s working beautifully, probably due to our very cool and wet spring.
The salad is growing on our deck in three planter boxes that I placed there last summer. If you have a small space, you can grow a garden too. It’s very simple! What could you grow? A tomato plant or two, a tiny apple tree, or yes, some deck salad. If you have a little bit of sunlight and a small growing space, you can find something that will grow on your deck.
Why grow your own in small spaces?
It’s more nutritious. Store-bought lettuce has traveled long distances. After it’s cut, it starts to lose nutrients. These greens can move from the garden to your plate in a matter of minutes. No more soggy salads!
It has more flavor. Whatever you grow will be a lot tastier than the store-bought alternative. Have you ever tasted a fresh tomato from the vine? Its taste is completely different than the ones that are picked green and ripen before you buy them.
You get more variety. At the store, the lettuce is often green, maybe red. On your deck, you can grow a greens mix with several greens at a time. I have mustard greens, kale, mizuna, spinach, and two types of lettuce in mine!
There are fewer pests. For some reason, the slugs don’t really want to migrate up 2 stories to eat my lettuce. That’s totally fine with me. Just don’t tell them it’s growing well up there, ok?
It’s a good alternative to running to the grocery store. There are usually a couple of days a week when I start to run out of vegetables. Instead of going to the store, I go to my deck and cut a nice green salad.
The packaging is pretty minimal. You know, I love to eat greens in the winter time. However, if I get a salad mix, I end up getting a plastic package of some sort. Then I have to recycle the package. Sometimes the package weighs more than the greens themselves!
Would you grow food on your deck? What’s stopping you?