All About Salad Greens

🌿 All About Salad Greens

Your go-to guide for growing, harvesting, and loving on these leafy legends.

🧬 Family Traits: What These Plants Share

This crew of leafy greens is cool-season royalty. They love chill spring and fall temps, thrive in partial sun, and prefer consistent moisture (but not soggy roots). They grow fast, offer multiple harvests, and bring color, crunch, and spice to the plate.

Shared characteristics:

• Shallow roots and quick growth

• Thrive in well-amended, moist soil

• Prefer cooler temps (they bolt when it gets hot!)

• Perfect for cut-and-come-again harvesting

• Need at least 4-6 hours of direct sun

🪴 How to Grow Them in Mountain Conditions

🌱 Seed Starting

• Direct sow or start in soil blocks/pots indoors 4–6 weeks before transplant.

• Most varieties germinate best between 50–70°F (soil and air temperature.)

🌦️ Sowing & Transplanting

• Try planting a patch from seeds every 2 weeks starting April 1 (in Eagle)

• Wait to transplant your precious seedlings when temps stay above 26-28.

• Space 6-8" apart for little heads or densely sow (1/2"-1") for baby leaf harvests.

• Use row cover for early planting and frost protection.

• Keep planting new patches every 4 weeks through the summer for the tenderest leaves. Final spinach sowing on Labor Day.

🍽️ Feeding & Soil Support

• Prep with compost (if needed) and an organic source of nitrogen (likely needed).

• Shallow roots = consistent watering + soft mulch to retain moisture.

✂️ Harvesting

• Start cutting baby leaves when 3–5" tall.

• Harvest outer leaves "early and often" or cut entire heads.

• Avoid letting them bolt by harvesting regularly and providing shade in heat.

• When plants become unpleasantly bitter, cut them out and leave roots to rot in place.

🥕 The Veggies in This Group

Lettuce

• Mild, crunchy, or buttery depending on the type. Perfect for mixes!

• Succession sow every 2–3 weeks for continuous harvest.

🌿 Seed Saving:

• Allow plants to bolt and flower.

• Isolation recommended between types.

• Collect seed heads when dry and beat them into a bucket.

🌱 Varieties We're Growing:

• Red Butterhead Lettuce (Garnet Gem) – Compact, sweet, and bolt-tolerant.  Frank Morton selected this gem and named it well, its pebbled leaves shaded red and light plum with touches of brown on a green base. Sweet, crunchy, with buttery goodness, a very fulfilling balance. The compact (12" wide by 9" tall) tight uniform heads form gorgeous rosettes held upright for a clean market and salad harvest. Garnet Butter Gem is as sweet as the well-regarded Sweet Valentine with even better bolt tolerance, and heads that hold and tighten.

• Romaine (Jericho) – Tall, crunchy, heat-resistant.  Has become the classic summer romaine for warm regions. An imposing romaine, under fertile conditions it can grow dense hefty 2' tall heads of light green sword-shaped upright leaves. Yet it remains crisp, juicy and unusually sweet, most years resisting tipburn or bolting well into July. Remains attractive even in bad years and tolerates bottom end rot.

• Batavian/Romaine (Concept) – Vase-like bunches, heat tolerant.  The Concept here is a combination of a batavian with a romaine. As the plant reaches full maturity, the whorling thick succulent juicy medium-green leaves start to close up at the top. Can be used for baby lettuce or allowed to mature into a vase-like bunch. As with most batavian types, it is relatively tolerant of hot weather and rarely bitter.

• Summer Harvest (Anuenue) – Slow-growing, crisp, and sweet in high heat.  Its mellifluous Hawaiian name (pronounced AH-new-ee-new-ee) means ‘rainbow’ though it is a uniform dark green. Anuenue doesn’t look like much in June when most other lettuce is in full glory, but as the days get shorter and the heat gets stronger it really comes into its own. In late July and even early August, this 1987 University of Hawaii introduction has no peers for crispness and sweetness and never develops even the faintest hint of bitterness. Slow growth is its secret. It remains compact as it matures, surrounding its round tightly packed heart with crisp outer leaves. About a quarter of the plants show an even more compact form. Unlike most lettuces, seed will germinate at 80°. Also has some winter hardiness with protection, surviving temperatures in the teens under cover.

• Freedom Lettuce Blend – Diverse, flavorful, disease-resistant mix.  An inspiring mix with plenty of surprises, this gene pool was created by Frank Morton in his so-called “Hell’s Half-Acre lettuce trial,” in which he crossed his most disease-resistant cultivars with his best-tasting varieties to select and recombine for excellent traits.  Morton invites growers and breeders to work with this mix to create new varieties for their farms or for the general public, while stipulating that nothing derived from it may be patented or protected from others’ use in any way. This strategy, originated by software developers, is now known as copyleft (as opposed to traditional copyright). Morton has adopted it to keep his varieties and their derivatives in the public domain as a protected commons. Seeds as nature’s software! Copyleft has the potential to return to free use such shared resources as our plant heritage that rightfully belong to all of us. As Morton proclaims, “Adaptive breeding cannot occur under a system of restrictive ownership.”

• Summer Lettuce Blend – Bolting-resistant red, green, and bronze mix.  A special selection of red, green and bronze lettuce varieties that most years will stand well into July without bolting.

• Stalk Lettuce/Celtuce (Cracoviensis) – Grows to bolt; edible stems like asparagus. Cracoviensis is where the red meets the green, making a dazzling twisting rosette with heavy purple accenting, especially towards the center. Recommended for spring and fall culture, the plants grow fast and very large (14–16") in cool temps. Called “Bolt-o-viensis” by Scott Paquin, it sends up seed stalks with just a touch of heat. No matter: the leaves’ tender buttery flavor does not give way to bitterness even after bolting! Those thick fleshy bolted stems are prized in China where they are peeled and eaten like asparagus. Listed as a distinct type, Asparagus Lettuce, in The Vegetable Garden by Vilmorin-Andrieux (1885).

Spinach

• Nutty, cold-hardy, and quick to mature.

• Direct sow early spring through summer and again in late summer.

• Some varieties like 'Space' reliably overwinter.

🌿 Seed Saving:

• Save seeds from several female plants.

• Collect seeds once dry.

🌱 Varieties We're Growing:

• Giant Winter – Late fall greenhouse or overwintering under mulch.  Open-pollinated. Selected for its cold hardiness. Recommended for late fall greenhouse crops, or overwintering under mulch. The most productive for late fall/early winter production under cover with up to six times the leaf matter of competing varieties. Not as good springback recovery from hard winters as Winter Bloomsdale. Large medium-green semi-savoyed leaves.

• Olympia – Fast-growing, smooth, mild, and cold-hardy.  An outstanding performer for the fall crop and early winter, Olympia grows fast, producing enormous yields of mostly smooth leaves up to 5x6". Almost entirely lacking in oxalic-acid taste, the mild flavor is paired with lush texture. But Olympia can’t stand the heat and bolts quickly when planted in spring.

• Space – Thick, juicy leaves; reliably overwinters.  Produces the kind of vigorous big thick wavy mostly smooth, slightly savoyed leaves that gardeners adore. Relatively long-standing when sown in early spring. Vigorous at all times, it was the quickest to mature from a fall planting.

Mustard Greens

• Spicy, bold, and quick-growing.

• Great for cut-and-come-again or full-leaf harvest.

• Buds, flowers, and pods are edible when bolting.

🌿 Seed Saving:

• Let pods dry on the plant.

• Isolate from other Brassicas.

🌱 Varieties We're Growing:

• Purple Rapa – Colorful, mild-tangy, OSSI seed. Cold-hardy.  Frank Morton selected well-mixed breeding pools for disease resistance and particularly for pink and purple pigmentation on the midribs. Lots of variation remains in leaf color (from light green to green with purple edges), in indentations of the leaf edges and some in midrib coloration. Morton continues to select from the pool for specific types and you can, too. He is particularly interested in creating more color for baby cut salad mixes. Commercial operations will find a wealth of good cutting, home gardeners terrific salad fixings, mild but with just enough tang to keep you interested.

Chard

• Leafy, juicy, and often mistaken for spinach. Heat-tolerant and frost-resistant.

🌿 Seed Saving:

• Biennial. Overwinter indoors in pots if saving seed.

🌱 Varieties We're Growing:

• Red (Bali) – Fiery red stems, mild flavor, excellent regrowth. Bali chard is a spectrum leap from traditional rhubarb chard even at baby stage—it’s like putting little red lightning bolts in your salad mix. With a very dark lush green fully savoyed leaf, the veins and stalk contrast like fiery lava. Mouthfeel is juicy and succulent; flavor very mild. No odd bolting or wilting, no beet-rooted rejects or wiggly weird stems. Excellent regrowth for multiple harvests. This is red-chard perfection from Bejo Seeds. 

• Mild (Perpetual Spinach) – Tender, smooth leaves with a spinach-like flavor. Also called Leaf Beet. Leaf beet should be cultured like any other chard variety. It looks similar to other Swiss chards, but its stems are thinner and its exceptionally tender leaves are smoother, not puckered. It tastes unlike any other chard, imparting a spinach-like flavor that lingers pleasantly. Unlike spinach, Perpetual lasts through summer into fall as it withstands light and moderate frosts. 

🍴 From Garden to Table: Why They Matter

These greens are the unsung heroes of the early garden—quick to grow, packed with nutrition, and perfect for homegrown meals. Whether you're tossing a salad, layering a sandwich, or blending a smoothie, these leafy wonders make it easy to eat fresh from your own soil.

Preserving Tips:

• Store in sealed containers in fridge for up to a week.

• Spinach and mustard can be lightly blanched and frozen.

• Extra greens can be dehydrated and ground into powder for soups, sauces, and scrambles.