Salsa lovers, start planning your garden with salsa ingredients for you to enjoy the next summer with a flavorful salsa. I will provide you with tips to grow your own salsa garden in this blog using a raised bed and a one square foot gardening ideas.
Ways to plan your salsa garden
First, select a place where it receives direct sunlight for at least 6 hours a day. A 4 by 4 square foot raised bed is good enough for you to grow plenty fo salsa ingredients for your kitchen. A trellis will help tomatoes from shading other crops in your raised bed. Divide your raised bed using one square food idea to make it easy to grow all of your salsa ingredients. Plant your crops accordingly, i.e tomatoes along the trellis for its vine to get support, followed by peppers, then onions, garlic and finally cilantro.
Plant 3 tomatoes along the trellis, and four peppers in front of the tomatoes, meaning each in one square foot area. After the peppers come onions, plant 9 onions per square foot while garlic should be 6 per square foot. Finally, plant 9 cilantro per square foot in the last row. You can start tomatoes, onions and peppers from seeds or transplant them from a local nursery gardener nearby.
What to grow for your salsa garden
Tomatoes
You should select meaty tomato varieties with good flavor for the best salsa experience. Select tomato varieties with dense meat, fewer seeds and with less moisture content to avoid them watering down your salsa content. For salsa verde lovers, don’t forget to include one tomatillo plant, you will get a lot of tomatillos for salsa verde. Tomatoes will fruit for a longer period, so you are sure to get salsa for the whole of summer until the frost season is in. Tie tomato vines along the trellis as they grow and don’t forget to prune them.
Peppers
There are two varieties of pepper, mild and hot. Choose whatever you like and grow them in your garden. Mild peppers include bell peppers while hot peppers include anaheim. You can mix all of them for mixed pepper flavors in your salsa. Again you can purchase seedlings from a local nursery gardener or start from the seeds. Spacing for peppers is at least 12 inches apart. Water them regularly if there is no rain to ensure active growing throughout.
Onions
Onion flavors range from sweet to pungent. Select varieties of onions that do well in your zone. Either grow from seeds or transplant them to your salsa garden. Plant 9 onions per square foot and spacing of about 4 inches.
Garlic
Plant garlic in the fall for larger bulbs and in the spring for smaller bulbs but the same flavors. You can find garlic to grow online or from your garlic growing centres around you. During fall, plant garlic at 6 per square foot while during the spring plant 9 of them per square foot. Another option is garlic chive, which adds mild garlic taste to your salsa garden.
Now check the gallery below for inspiration on how to spice up your salsa garden and get the most out of it.
