method you choose to grow your greens also affects how you harvest them. If you grow a wide bed of baby greens, once the plants are three or four inches tall you harvest the greens either with scissors or with your fingers. You cut at least an inch above the crown so the plant will not be killed. Put the baby greens in a basket and bring them into the kitchen to be washed and served. After you pick your baby greens, fertilize the bed with fish emulsion; if the weather is suitable, they will resprout and be ready for a second harvesting in a few weeks. Sometimes they resprout a third time.
There is yet another method for growing varieties that head-up forming crisp, tight heads and rosette-type greens. Plant these varieties—such as lettuces, spinach, tatsoi, endive, escarole, kale, arugula, and mustards—in conventional rows. Your first harvest would be of the thinnings; then as the remaining plants became established (with six or eight leaves), you can harvest an outer leaf or so from each plant. Depending on the type of plant, once your plants reach mature size, you can either harvest the whole plant or continue to harvest individual leaves over a few months. As a rule, mature heading lettuces, cabbages, tatsoi, spinachs, curly endive, escarole, mâche, and arugula are harvested as entire plants. If you let them get too mature they will get bitter and develop a flowering stalk; this is called bolting. You can harvest individual tender young leaves off leaf lettuces, amaranths, Swiss chard, kales, and orach over a fairly long season. The perennials, dandelions and sorrel, are harvested over a number of years, either by picking a few leaves at a time as needed or by cutting back the entire plant a few times a year so new leaves will emerge a few weeks later. See the individual vegetable entries in the “Encyclopedia of Salad Greens” (page 23) for more specific harvesting information, especially for greens such as radicchio, escarole, and Belgian endive, which need special treatment.
All in all, a salad garden makes a wonderful beginner’s garden and provides a good selection for busy cooks. Few edible gardens can be as beautiful or as useful in the kitchen.
My salad gardens produce far more greens than I and my husband could ever use. Jesse Cool chef at the nearby Flea Street restaurant, visits and leaves with a few giant leaves of Japanese red mustard and a handful of lettuce leaves.
Jody Main my gardenmanager, harvests extra lettuces for a food bank.
the Creasy salad garden
My first official “salad garden” was in my backyard in 1984. In the middle of my small backyard is a huge but fruitless mulberry tree. For years I would stand staring at it and ask myself the same question: With all that shade and all that root competition, what edible plants can I grow under that tree? That spring it occurred to me that the area would be a perfect place for a salad garden. Leafy salad greens would grow in the cool sun of winter and spring, when the leaves were off the tree, and would do fine most of the summer and fall, when the shade of the tree would protect them from the heat. The problem of the mulberry’s invasive roots could be solved over time if I continued to dig up the roots and amend the soil every time I did a major planting beneath the tree.
I was right. A salad garden turned out to be the perfect solution to the problem. Not only did the salad vegetables grow well, but leafy greens interplanted with annual flowers also made a beautiful garden next to the patio. As a bonus, with a salad garden right off the kitchen, I found myself using many more salad greens than in the past, since it was so easy to harvest leaves as I needed them.
To prepare the area for the lettuces and herbs, I had the soil dug up under the part of the tree where the salad greens would go so as to remove as many mulberry roots as possible (something that is possible only when you have a mature specimen of a vigorous species). Then I added lots of compost and put in some low, pop-up sprinkler heads. To ensure a continuous supply of salad greens, my assistant at the time, Wendy Krupnick, set up a nursery area with starter flats so she could replant lettuce every six weeks or so. (We also bought seedlings from the nursery on occasion.) We found that starting lettuce plants by seeds in place in the garden sometimes resulted in spotty germination. Also, in watering the seedlings twice a day in the warm weather we were overwatering the tree and the more mature plants and contributing to fungus problems on the lettuces.
For more than two years we planted different lettuces and salad herbs recommended to me by restaurant gardeners and seed company folks. In the cool seasons all the lettuces, the chervil, the mâche, and the arugula did very well. On the other hand, for a short time in the hottest weather most of the greens did poorly; only the parsley and the ‘Oak Leaf,’ ‘Summer Bibb,’ and ‘Australian Yellow’ lettuces held up, but they needed to be harvested very young, or they would turn bitter.
It was certainly handy to have a salad garden right off the kitchen, but even handier was the method of lettuce harvesting that Wendy showed me. First thing in the morning, when the lettuces are dewy and the temperature is cool, she goes out and harvests enough salad greens for one or two days. She brings them in and washes and dries them in a salad spinner. (The salad spinner, a basket inside a plastic bowl, with a cover equipped with a spinning device, has to be one of the most useful modern kitchen inventions.) Then she dumps the salad mix into a plastic bag and puts it in the refrigerator. By picking the lettuces at their peak in the cool of the morning you ensure that your greens will be crisp and flavorful, and by washing them you make them available for use anytime, whether you’re grabbing a few leaves for a sandwich at lunch or making a salad in the evening.
I wake up to this view of my back patio When I moved the salad garden nearer to the kitchen I found myself harvesting from it more often. The rows of lettuce transplants shown here will be ready for harvesting in about a month.
At some point your baby lettuces will stop resprouting because the weather is too warm or because they are played out. You can prepare the bed for the next crop in two ways. The first is to simply turn the lettuces under, after which they will decompose quickly. The other way, which I prefer, is to leave the lettuces in place and gently plant your summer crops, like tomatoes and peppers, around them. This is called the “no till” method, and its benefits are that it cuts down on erosion and is easier on your soil structure. Another bonus is that the decomposing lettuces will feed your next crop.
After growing my backyard salad garden I became so enamored with these greens that in 1995 I designed a large garden full of them. It consisted of beds arranged between an array of planks encircling a birdbath. This garden became the focal point for the front yard. The salad greens and herbs were grown mostly in rows encircling what finally became called the “magic circle.” The rosettes of dozens of varieties of lettuces were interspersed with scallions, chives, spinach, mâche, and edible and purely decorative flowers. Of course, this garden produced much more than my husband and I could ever have consumed; it fed many of the neighbors, and we even had extra to take to the food bank. By growing so many salad greens at one time, though, I finally had a chance to compare many varieties and see how they tasted and held up to growing conditions in my microclimate. Alas, that garden is now gone—it went on to become a new garden, one filled with American heirloom vegetables and 18 flowers. I still grow many salad greens, however. They are interplanted among my other beds, in containers, and sometimes back under the tree near the patio.
My front yard “magic circle” salad garden in late spring provides us with copious amounts of greens, but also creates an exciting welcome to my home. There are salad greens in the containers by the tea house and rows of lettuces,
