Best Salad Greens To Grow In The Fall

Beauty, flavor and money in your pocket: a fall salad garden delivers it all.

By Barbara Pleasant
Updated on August 11, 2022
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by AdobeStock/Thinapob

Learn the best salad greens to grow in the fall and when you should do your fall greens planting. Beauty, flavor and money in your pocket: a fall salad garden delivers it all.

Easy to grow — and beautiful to boot — salad gardens are easy to love. Plant a fall salad garden. Lettuce and other salad makings are among the first crops to plant in spring, yet their fondness for cool weather also makes them great encore crops for fall. As a self-confessed salad addict, I often spend $5 a week on ready-to-eat gourmet greens when I can’t get them from my garden — reason enough to work up a little sweat planting a second season salad garden.

It’s a simple project that leads to fast rewards. Clear off a patch of ground in a spot that’s convenient to water, sow some seeds, and a fall salad patch will start spewing out tasty tidbits in only a few weeks.

What Salad Greens to Grow?

The major player in any salad garden is lettuce (Lactuca sativa), which comes in an amazing array of colors and textures. If you have partially used seed packets of lettuce leftover from spring, start with those varieties, because shard-shaped lettuce seeds often lose viability after only a year. Did your spring crop get tall and bitter before you could eat it all? Some of the frilliest lettuce varieties can’t wait to bolt when days are getting longer and warmer in spring, but in the fall garden they hold much longer. If you need to buy lettuce seeds, starting with a mixture of varieties is an effortless way to turn your salad garden into a tapestry of colors and textures. All the mail-order seed companies sell various lettuce blends, often called mesclun, that include a palette of leaf colors and forms.

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