by Bill Whitney

Created on: January 09, 2009   Last Updated: April 18, 2010

For someone who grew up in an area where there were a lot of Mexican families and for someone who has always loved tomatoes, onions, and peppers, having a salsa garden was sort of a natural thing. Good home made salsa has been part of my diet and life for nearly 60 years.  The rich soil of the family farm in western Nebraska gave a young man plenty of room to raise a nice garden.

Raising a salsa garden is really quite easy and does not take a whole lot of room. With window boxes and whiskey barrels and maybe an AeroGrow or two you can have all the ingredients you need to make a lot of different salsas. The main requirement is some good loamy soil with plenty of compost and maybe some good rotted manure if you can find some, a source of water, and some basic care. It depends on how much salsa you want but I am lucky to have plenty of room for everything I need for salsa and I have two AeroGrow hydroponic gardens that give me fresh herbs and lots of cherry tomatoes.

The basic ingredients of all salsas, are tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, bell pepers, cilantro, lemon or lime juice and a little good grade olive oil. Salsa is very flexible in that it can be made very mild or very hot and all tastes in between, You can add all different kinds of fruit to give it a sweet or fruity taste if that is what you like.

To start off tomatoes are easy to grow in a box garden or a big garden or in a couple of old oak whiskey barrels. They require a rich loamy soil with a little lime in it to prevent blossom end rot. A drip system works great if you can rig it up and they need plenty of sun to develop that good rich flavor. I use Jobe's Fetilizer spikes on my tomatoes and it seems to help them a lot. The lycopene is tomatoes is very good for you. Tomatoes fresh off the vine whether it be big tomatoes or cherry tomatoes are one of my favorites. My seven year old granddaughter loves cherry tomatoes too.

Bell peppers are another very important ingredient in good salsa. I like to use red, green, yellow, and orange ones in salsa to give the salsa a lot of color plus they are good too. I raise my peppers in two big old oak whiskey barrels in a mixture of potting soil, regular old dirt and some good home made compost. They need to be kept moist but don't over do it. Again I use Jobe spikes as an additional boost.

Next to tomatoes, jalapenos are one of the most essentail ingredients to making a good salsa. Jalapenos are fairly easy to grow in a flower box or a window garden and

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