Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening

Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening offers good news: With nothing more than a cupboard and a windowsill, you can grow all the fresh salad greens you need for the winter months (or throughout the year) with no lights, pumps, nor greenhouse.

Longtime gardener Peter Burke was tired of the growing season ending with the first frost, but due to his busy work schedule and family life, he didn’t have the time or interest in high-input grow lights or greenhouses. Most techniques for growing what are commonly referred to as “microgreens” left him overwhelmed and uninterested. There had to be a more straightforward way to grow greens for his family indoors. After some research and diligent experimenting, Burke discovered he was right—there was a way! And it was even easier than he ever could have hoped, and the greens more nutrient-packed. He didn’t even need a south-facing window and already had most of the needed supplies just sitting in his pantry. The result: healthy, homegrown salad greens at a fraction of the cost of buying them at the market. The secret: Start them in the dark.

Growing “Soil Sprouts”—Burke’s descriptive term for sprouted seeds grown in soil as opposed to in jars—employs a method that encourages a long stem without expansive roots and provides delicious salad greens in just seven to 10 days, way earlier than any other method, with much less work. Indeed, this is the easiest and most productive technique of all the ways to grow immature greens. Forget about grow lights and heat lamps! This book is a revolutionary and inviting guide for first-time and experienced gardeners in rural or urban environments. All you need is a windowsill or two.

Burke has grown up to 6 pounds of greens per day using just the windowsills in his kitchen! Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening offers detailed step-by-step instructions for mastering this method (hint: it’s impossible not to succeed, it’s so easy!), tools and accessories to have on hand, seeds and greens varieties, soil and compost, trays and planters, shelving, harvest and storage, recipes, scaling up to serve local markets, and much more.