My salad items come from my pantry shelves and from my garden. A packet of lettuce seeds can be had for $1.29 to $3.79, and it will provide many heads of lettuce (the bigger ones contain 750 seeds). The lettuce that grows the best for me is Black Seeded Simpson. It is a pale green, looseleaf lettuce. It grows in the fall, winter, and spring here, but not during the summer.

Tomatoes grow in the early summer and in the fall, but not during the heat of the summer; they stop producing when it gets over 90º, which is five to six months