Potted plants add color, texture, beauty and versatility to your indoor and outdoor spaces. Here's everything you need to know about container gardening.

Grow a Bowl of Salad in Pots

Salad greens are among the easiest vegetables to grow, require little space and mature in a few weeks. Here's how to nurture a healthy "salad bowl" close to your kitchen.

Excerpted from How to Grow Practically Everything
Filed under: Vegetables, Vegetable Gardening, Container Gardening, Plants, Gardening

When to Start: spring and throughout summer

At Its Best: summer into autumn

Time to Complete: 30 minutes

Materials Needed:

mixed-salad leaf seed
containers
soil
scissors

Choose a Variety

For an attractive and colorful display — and an interesting bowl of salad — look for seed mixes containing a variety of different colors and textures. Lettuce mixes are a good choice early in the season because they germinate well and grow abundantly in cooler conditions. The cooler nighttime temperatures in spring, and lengthening days, can make baby Oriental leaf mixtures flower and go to seed all too quickly; sow these after midsummer. Ensure your containers have drainage holes at the bottom, and cover them with broken pot pieces. Then fill with compost and firm down.

Sow on Soil Surface

Sow thinly across the surface, cover lightly with soil and water well. Cut-and-come-again crops can be sown thickly, but thin the seedlings to a spacing of about 2 inches when they are large enough to handle.

Harvest the Leaves

When the leaves reach about 6 inches high, cut them with a pair of scissors. Keep them fresh until needed in a moistened, sealed plastic bag. The plants will re-grow several times before they are exhausted and need replacing.