One of the most wonderful things about growing a vegetable garden is that you have the flexibility of growing what you like to eat the most. You can also control exactly how the vegetables are grown. A few weeks ago, I featured a post on creating a salsa garden as a part of your vegetable garden. If you have a specific purpose for your home grown vegetables, you can tailor your vegetable garden, or a part of your vegetable garden, to fit that purpose.

One purpose for my vegetable garden is providing fresh ingredients for a great salad. If you love a good salad perhaps you should dedicate a portion of your vegetable garden for a salad garden! You don't need a ton of space, a small 4' x 4' or 4' x 8' raised bed will be plenty of room to grow a great salad garden!

Let's go over a couple possible salad garden designs that you can easily implement as a part of your vegetable garden.

Salad Garden Design for a 4' x 4' Raised Bed

If you visit Veggie Gardener enough you will soon learn that I love to create my vegetable garden designs using GrowVeg.com. GrowVeg is very simple to use and easily creates fantastic vegetable garden plans and lists. Here is a very easy four foot by four foot salad garden design.

This four foot square salad garden design is packed with all types of fresh salad goodies. Here is what this design contains:
    • One cucumber plant
    • One tomato plant
    • One Bell Pepper or other pepper plant
    • Two Lettuce plants
    • Two Baby Spinach plants
    • One Arugula plant
    • Five Radishes
    • Three Onions
When I think of a delicious fresh salad these are some of the first vegetables I think of. The four foot by four foot size is perfect for almost any sized vegetable garden space. This salad garden design should be enough to provide a good amount of ingredients for a salad lover.

Salad Garden Design for 4' x 8' Raised Bed

If you have a little more space in your vegetable garden, you can grow a little bit bigger salad garden and add a few more possible salad veggies. Here is a salad garden layout for a four foot by eight foot raised bed.

large salad garden

Here's a list of the vegetables included in this salad garden layout:
    • Two tomato plants
    • Four lettuce plants (head lettuce such as Mesa)
    • Twelve radishes
    • Four lettuce plants (leaf lettuce such as Romaine)
    • One bell pepper or other pepper plant
    • Two baby spinach plants
    • One cucumber plant
    • Two arugula plants
    • Two radicchio plants
    • Five onions or shallots
    • One swiss chard plant
As you can see, this salad garden is packed with eleven great tasting salad ingredients! This garden layout will produce a huge amount of salad greens that is fit for a king. The larger layout should easily provide enough salad offerings for a small family.

These salad garden designs are very customizable to fit your specific needs. I placed the most common vegetables used in salads, but you can place what ever you like in your salad garden plan.

My Favorite Garden Planner

Once again, I used GrowVeg.com to do all of my garden plans, including the snapshots of the two above. GrowVeg is a very easy tool for creating very detailed and informative garden plans.

For more information on using GrowVeg to plan your gardens, please review the following articles:

Using An Online Garden Planning Tool

My Garden Plan - Revision 1

You can learn more by visiting the GrowVeg.com demo. The demo will quickly show you just how easy and valuable the GrowVeg Online Garden Planner is! You can give it a try for Free for 30 days!

I highly recommend it for all your garden planning needs. Give it a spin today!!

Include A Salad Garden In Your Vegetable Garden

If you really enjoy fresh, homemade salads then you should add a salad garden to your vegetable garden. Just think - you could have a terrific salad along side your meal at a fraction of what a supermarket salad would cost, and it will be more nutritious and better tasting!