You don’t need a lot of space for a salsa garden; you could even grow your ingredients in containers. However since the beauty of homemade salsa is its freshness, you’ll want to devote enough space for multiple plants, to keep your harvest coming. And you will have to be patient; most of these ingredients are not ready to pick until at least mid-summer. Pick a sunny spot for planting, and fill your salsa garden with the ingredients listed below. Suggestions for the number of plants to grow, both in the ground and in containers, are provided and you’ll find links to specific growing instructions for each vegetable.
Beefsteak tomatoes: A juicy, meaty tomato with few seeds, it’s great for a thick salsa. Roma tomatoes: Choose types, such as Little or Big Mama, which are mini Roma tomatoes or Amish paste tomatoes which are sweeter types of Romas. Cherry tomatoes: This is a good option if you are growing your tomato plants in a container. Amish Paste tomatoes: These are similar to Roma tomatoes, but the flavor is slightly sweeter.
Tomato plants can grow very large. They will need a minimum of two square feet per plant in your garden or one plant per container. For your salsa garden, three tomato plants should keep you going all summer if you don’t eat them right off the vine first. If heat is not your thing, you can still enjoy homemade sauce by growing sweet peppers in your salsa garden. There is no rule that salsa much be searing. You’ll need three to five pepper plants, depending on how spicy you like your salsa. Hot peppers tend to produce more fruits, but sweet peppers are usually larger. Since onions do not regrow once harvested, you’ll need quite a few plants to span the season; one for each batch of salsa you make. Luckily onions keep a long time in storage. Plan for at least 20-30. Scallion, or green onions, may re-sprout and could also be succession planted, to give you a longer season of harvest. Start with at least two cilantro plants. Although the plants will re-sprout, they will eventually go to seed, so you will need to keep re-planting and replacing them. Garlic chives make a nice, milder alternative to chopped garlic and chive plants readily re-sprout, so you will need far fewer plants, only two or three. You can also use garlic scapes, in mid-summer, while you’re waiting for your garlic to mature. You’ll need two plants for cross-pollination and those two plants should provide you with all the tomatillos you will need. They tend to self-sow, if any are left in the garden, and return next year. If you are growing your tomatillos in containers, give each plant its own pot. These are large branching plants.
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