Growing salad indoors

I like salad. As a main, as a side dish... I like to eat salad. BUT: I do not like to buy salad in the grocery store. Ever bought grocery store salad? Rocket, for example? Jep, that slimy, sweaty, sad looking green stuff in the plastic bag. Not particularly delicious and tempting, right?

So, I set out to grow my own salad this year. No problem during summer. We grew rocket, cut and come again salad, and more rocket. The south-facing balcony gave them lots of sun and us lots of fresh salad.

But now we are in the middle of autumn, approaching winter. How about my salad now? Can I grow salad indoors? Short answer: YES! Now, let's get into the details and of course some pretty pictures!

I used a small tin pot for my first try and cut and come again salad seeds that were still leftover from summer. Also, I tried growing basil. In the pictures, you will also see the progress of the basil experiment.

Let's get started. After sowing, the pots were placed on the windowsill of our living room window facing south. I watered them daily with a self-made spray bottle. After a week, the salad looked like this:

 Next to the salad (on the right), you can see the basil:

Both salad and basil developed first leaves and grew on happily. I kept on watering them, giving them a little bit of water every day and kept them on the windowsill. We also have the central heating on every morning for an hour and in the evening which they seem to like.

Now, after two weeks, they are looking like this.

 

The salad is ready and will be used for tonight's dinner. I can just cut it and leave the rest of the stems to grow new salad leaves for a second harvest. The basil is not quite that well, I think. It grew taller, but the development of the real leaves (the little leaves on the plants) is going really slow. They look more like bolting then like developing. I will keep them, though, and see if I can get the basil to grow further.

I am really pleased with the results and will sow a second batch of salad today and urge you to try the same. All you need is a sunny window, a bit of watering and you can have lovely, tasty salad instead of the green slime from the supermarket.