Here Are the Reasons You Should Start Growing Your Own Salad Greens at Home

Have you ever looked at a bowl of lettuce and just felt sad?

If so, I don't blame you. In our current U.S. food system, 98 percent of our salad greens is grown in just two places: Salinas Valley, California, and Yuma Valley, Arizona (where they have like no water). I've lived a lot of places, but I've never lived close to Arizona or California. Many of us don't. So all our baby spinach leaves and our spring mix and our arugula have to be shipped across the country. That's how we get our salad. That's why we have sad salads.

But our salad bowls don't have to make us feel sad. If there is one thing that I am convinced every single person in the entire world could grow themselves, it is salad.

I think these five reasons you should start growing your own salad greens are pretty convincing, but you can let me know!

Homegrown Salad Has Way More Nutrients Than Lettuce from the Store

Here's how your salad greens currently get to you: after harvest, they're packed in plastic and put on a truck, they sit on that truck for a couple of days, and then they sit on the grocery store shelf for more than a couple days. Those greens finally come home with you after you spend your hard-earned money on them, and then... they sit on your refrigerator shelf for a couple more days, right?

From the time those leaves are harvested to the moment they go into your mouth, it's likely that 7 to 14 days have passed.

We're all told we need to eat more salads to be healthy, but we rarely consider the actual nutritional value of those salads after all that time. Salads are made of leaves, and leaves are the most tender part of the plant. They're the first to lose water and nutrients when taken off the plant. Roots and fruit last much, much longer. Leaves, unfortunately, begin degrading the second you cut them from the plant. It's just how their cells are structured.

So we're eating these fragile leaves that have been trucked across the country, thinking that we're doing a lot of good for our bodies because we're eating a salad. But really, we're just eating some fiber. Most of those vitamins and antioxidants we think we're ingesting are gone.

The only way to enjoy nutrients in leaves the minute they're harvested is by growing your own. Instead of sitting on a truck and getting cold and then hot and being handled and then waiting, those leaves can go straight from the garden, where they're growing, to your salad bowl.

A just-harvested salad is one of the best ways you can get vitamins and minerals into your body. Those leaves are some of the most nutrient-dense veggies you can eat. Take care of your body, y'all. You only get one, so give it some fresh greens every day.

Homegrown Greens Also Taste Way Better Than Store-Bought Leaves

The second reason you should grow your own salad is for the taste. If you've never looked forward to eating a salad in your life, it's because the leaves you're buying from the store just don't taste all that good. How could they after all they've been through to get to your plate?

Don't blame the leaves for not tasting good. It's not the lettuce's fault. Blame the source.

When I experienced my first harvest of homegrown salad, I remember thinking, "I just tasted salad for the first time—salad the way it's meant to taste." It's like when you go strawberry picking or taste a blueberry straight from the bush. It's just different. Fresher. Crispier. Juicier. Fresh lettuce doesn't taste like watery cardboard. You don't need to douse those leaves in salad dressing to get flavor. They already have a lot.

Besides the freshness, you can also enjoy so much variety when you grow your own. There are only a few types of lettuce sold at the grocery store. When you get into salad gardening, you quickly learn there are hundreds of types of lettuce you can grow. There are spicy leaves, sweet leaves, crunchy leaves. Variety is the spice of life, right? If you're sick of Caesar salads with romaine or spinach salads, there are so many more textures and flavors out there.

And when you like the way something tastes, you tend to eat more of it.

Growing Your Own Salad Cuts Down on Food Waste

It's estimated that the average U.S. household throws away $1,600's worth of groceries every year. I'm pretty sure $1,599 of that is mushy spinach. There's an apropos meme that says, "I just bought a head of lettuce. Should I throw it out now or wait two weeks like I usually do?"

We waste so many greens because they go bad by the time we bring them home.

Growing your own means significantly cutting down on your food waste. If you're at all aware of what's happening to our planet, you know we need less food tossed in the trash bin, right? Instead of that bag of spring mix turning brown in your crisper drawer just waiting for you to toss it in the trash, you can have leaves growing in your garden. You don't harvest them until you're ready to eat them. The plants keep growing until you come back for more.

Stop throwing away your money. No more putting thousands of dollars of store-bought leaves in the trash every year. That money is much better off being put toward a salad garden.

Growing Your Own Greens Reduces Your Food Miles

Remember how almost all our salad is grown in just two places? If you don't live near either of those places, your food is traveling a lot of miles to get to your plate, and it's just not necessary. When I first started growing leafy greens, I had so many leaves I had to give them away to friends and neighbors. I harvested one bowl a day to feed my family, and still my beds were overflowing. I only went to the grocery store to buy other things because, of course, we weren't just eating salad.

Keep in mind, I didn't own a huge lot. I wasn't farming acres and acres of land. I just had a little salad box, and it was growing enough salad for me, my family, and some lucky friends and neighbors.

Salad plants are so abundant, and yet we're shipping all these leaves across the country to put on grocery store shelves. Why? It makes no sense. The missing piece here is knowledge. If everybody knew just how easy it is to grow their own salad greens right outside their back door, we could cut down on fuel usage to get those plastic boxes across the country.

If climate change makes you feel helpless and heartbroken—if you're like, "What can I do to help? I'm just this one little person, and the big guys are making all the decisions"—here is how you can participate. Do your small part by growing your own salad. Every time you skip past those plastic bags at the grocery store, you're cutting down on food miles needed to feed your family.

Those little changes add up, and if all of us were making these changes, they'd really add up. We may not be able to make decisions up at the White House, but we could make a statement to the food industry. "Hey, we're good on salad, thanks. Grow some broccoli for us or something." We can grow enough for ourselves. We can even provide for the people around us.

Growing Your Own Salad Is So Dang Easy

This last reason is a good one. You can grow your own salad in a simple setup. All you need is a container, some sandy loam soil, seeds, and a consistent water source, and you're in business.

You can do this on a patio or porch—any itty bitty slice of Earth that gets 4 to 6 hours of sunlight a day. If you have a bigger space, like a deck or a patio, you can grow even more. And if you have a whole backyard, you can become your neighborhood's supplier for organic salad.

These plants are very small. They don't take up much space, and they grow from seed to harvest in about 45 days. They don't need to be trellised or pruned. They're not that prone to pest issues. And they're what we call cut-and-come-again plants, meaning you can harvest from them and they regrow. So it's not like you only get one harvest per seed. It's more like five harvests per seed.

I mean, it's easy, okay? Growing salad is actually how I learned to garden. It really is something all of us can do, even if you swear to me that you have a black thumb. If I could do it 11 years ago with zero gardening experience, you can do it, too.

So Have I Convinced You to Grow Your Own Salad?

I so, so hope that you're going to become a salad gardener with me this year. And I have tons of resources to help you get started. You can actually read Chapter 3 of my second book, Leaves, Roots, and Fruit, here. Chapter 3 is a step-by-step guide for growing leafy greens. I've also got more details about growing lettuce in containers and setting up a simple salad box in your backyard.

All right, grab your seeds and start growing some salad. Send me a picture of your first harvest!

Thanks for being here and doing your part to end sad salads.