Our latest YouTube video shares our favorite varieties to grow in your fall salad garden. Diversity in the key to a flavorful, delicious bowl of greens, and you won’t miss the dressing if you plant these.
Varieties for Your Fall Salad Garden
A salad is more than lettuces, it’s mache, spinach, mustard greens, and more. Why waste your money buying bags of mixed greens for way too much money, when you can grow them for pennies? Plus the harvest is steps away from the dinner table, rather than from up to 1,500 miles away.
Lettuces and other greens are easy to grow from seed. Most germinate in 7 to 10 days, and are ready to start picking a couple weeks after that. Start now, and you’ll be eating fresh home-grown salads before Thanksgiving.
Some of our Favorites
Mache – Gros Graine, Coquille de Louvier, Gala
Mustard Greens – Osaka purple, Tatsoi, Sawtooth, Mizuna
Arugula – wild and common varieties
Spinach – Verdil, Bloomsdale, Winter Giant
Lettuces – Pirat, Butter crunch, Oak leaf, Kweik, Forellenschluss, Tennis Ball, Black Seeded Simpson, Reine des Glaces, Four Seasons, Rouge D’hiver
Find most of these varieties in the seed catalogs we recommend on our Links Page. We’ve spent years discovering these great lettuces and other greens as a starting point for your own exploration. Dive in and have fun with this. There’s more to life than romaine, bibb, and iceberg lettuces!
Thank you for the information. My spring and summer garden did so well-first time- but the fall lettuces never grew. How do you prepare the soil. I think now I may have not given enough compost before planting in September. I replanted seeds in October here in ohio 6b with fresh espoma raised garden bed soil but again seeds did not germinate. Will try again next year. Thanks for any suggestions.
Veronica, I’m wondering a couple of things: 1) If you seeded these lettuces outside in the garden, what’s the possibility that birds visited your garden and pilfered your seeds? Or 2) If you seeded lettuces indoors in seed trays, what soil mix did you use? I really like a product called Quickroot from Peaceful Valley Farm and Garden Supply (groworganic.com). It works great for germinating seeds in seed trays. If outside, I always try to go with biodynamic compost if possible. Malibu Compost is my local favorite, but you may have another resource where you live.