Year-Round Lettuce & Salad Mixes

It's easy to think of salad greens as just a spring- or fall-garden crop, but it's possible to enjoy freshly harvested lettuces, mustards and more from your own garden year-round.

- Susan M. Brackney

From corn salad (mâche) and sorrel to rocket and collards, there are countless types of greens to try. And, when you add in all the different heirloom varieties available, you're bound to find some new crops that are perfect for your individual microclimate.

“Lettuces were developed, even in the 1600s, to be seasonal,” says William Woys Weaver, a food historian and the author of Heirloom Vegetable Gardening. “You have winter lettuces that really grow under the snow. You’ve got spring lettuces and you’ve got summer lettuces — lettuces which don’t bolt quickly in hot weather. So, it’s a year-round vegetable.”

Weaver is also the founder of the Roughwood Center for Heritage Seedways, a Pennsylvaniabased nonprofit which maintains a vast collection of heirloom vegetable and flower seed varieties. Regarding his work with lettuces, he says, “I really concentrated on gathering together the lettuces that were known to be grown here regionally in the 18th century. … Thomas Jefferson grew a lot of interesting lettuces from France, and we know what those lettuces were because there are lists. And there are advertisements for lettuces in old newspapers and that kind of thing. That’s how we go back and get descriptions of these plants, so that we know that we’ve got the right thing.”

Winter Greens

Landis Winter Lettuce is one of the most popular lettuces Weaver has collected and grown. “You plant that lettuce in September, and you will have it all winterlong,” he says. “The trick to having winter lettuce is to get it to develop a nice, strong root system before the cold weather sets in. Once it’s got a good root, then it’ll die back a little bit, but, on a warm day in the winter, it’ll pop right up.”