When it comes to tender salad greens, you need to be able to seize the moment. To harvest at a moment’s notice, it’s best to keep them close to home. So you use the circular elevated oaken growing medium system — also known as the whisky barrel method.

A few years back you were headed home in the minivan when you spotted a discarded whisky half-barrel, sturdily made of fitted oak strips bound by metal hoops. It had fallen out of fashion with your neighbor and had been placed hopefully on the boulevard. You knew the barrels sold for $29 at Home Depot so in a flash the whisky barrel was into the hatch of your Windstar.

You heaved and grunted the barrel into place on your balcony and dreamed of spring. Late at night while you were still wired from winter pickup hockey, you cruised the William Dam Seed catalogue looking for the perfect salad mix. You settled on a $1.95 packet of Healthkick Salad Blend, a special mix apparently high in phytonutrients. You didn’t know what that meant but, as an omnivore, you knew it was better than the single classic combo at Wendy’s.

When the ice melted on your balcony, you drilled a few holes in the base of the barrel, placed a few rocks and broken clay pots into the bottom for drainage, and started hauling soil to fill it. You mixed in some peat to retain moisture, and added a token earthworm to aerate and fertilize the soil. You sowed the pack of seeds, then watered, weeded and waited.

A month later the whisky barrel was stuffed with greens. You began to harvest for salads, picking a leaf or two from each plant so that the plants continued to grow.

For the next month, your barrel grew like a Chia Pet, putting at least a dozen good-sized salads on the table. The fresh-picked lettuce with augmented with chives and onion greens grown in smaller pots.

The whisky barrel method offered several advantages — as a raised bed, it allowed easy weeding. Its size meant it could hold water for four or five days at a stretch, even in hot weather, reducing the chance of a wilted crop from a smaller pot. Its proximity to the kitchen made it easy to harvest and to whip up a salad with dinner on the go.

You got so excited by the success of the whisky barrel method that you took time-lapse photos of your crop every week or so, and tried to show them to your wife and kids. They were not amused by the pics, but kept eating your salads.

Over the years you experimented with other whisky barrel crops — early Arugula, lush Bloomsdale Dark Green Spinach, a Mesclun mix of unknown exotic greens, and the herbal quartet of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.

Your collection of whisky barrels grew as you spotted other barrels discarded by neighbors and allowed yourself the luxury of forking over $29 for a new barrel from Home Depot.

In late summer, you replanted the barrels and continued to harvest well into the fall. The ultimate crop was a vigorous Bok Choi that lasted on your balcony into late November. Before frost set in, you added home-made compost to pay forward next year’s crops.

As you hit middle age, you looked back wistfully on the time you had manhandled the heavy barrels up the stairs to your balcony. You took pride in your environmentally friendly growing system — and began to think that if you ever sold the house, you’d probably leave your gi-normous whisky barrels on the balcony — as a gift to the next owner.