Hot summer days call for light, simple meals that don’t need cooking. You want a plate of sandwiches and a tossed salad, eaten under a tree.
But if your idea of salad is a bowl of lettuce, the garden may fail you even as it overflows with tomatoes and beans. The heat that is surely coming to Western summers is hard on a lettuce crop.
Poor germination and premature bolting can make you give up on a lettuce crop just when you want it most.
A few garden tricks can help, such as germinating lettuce indoors, then growing it under shade cloth in humus-rich, moisture-retentive soil and keeping it watered. You also can in a location that gets morning light, but afternoon shade, or at altitude, where the 80s and 90s don’t happen.
You might also choose the crisper, sturdier Batavian lettuces that hold up better in heat — varieties such as Nevada and Muir. Israeli-bred Jericho, a romaine, is another good choice. Wait to plant the more frilly or buttery types until mid-to late summer, when they’ll germinate fast, but mature in the cooler weather they love.
But the more adventurous solution is to eschew lettuce and simply
Consider a Swiss chard called Erbette, a beautifully mild and tasty crop that’s fairly summer-proof. In salads, its narrow-stemmed leaves are best at a size no bigger than your hand; cut them and new ones will grow.
Beet greens, picked small, are also salad-worthy, whether they’re grown as a leaf crop in their own right or you use the thinnings from a row of beetroots.
Don’t stop there. Experiment with something new — maybe with succulent leaves that thrive on heat. Grow the equally gorgeous , which adds a lemony taste to salads. Try purple orach, too, with its tender foliage that’s rich in antioxidants.
Pam Dawling, writing in the current issue of Growing for Market magazine, lists some leaf crops she grows in summer at the Twin Oaks Community in Louisa, Va. She likes the various vegetable amaranths, which come in green, red and even green striped with red.
Dawling also recommends such as mizuna, komatsuna, yukina savoy and mild, non-heading Asian cabbages such as Tokyo Bekana and Maruba Santoh. In my experience, these are great in salads when picked young.
In general, the best strategy for summer greens is a mixture of cut-and-come-again harvests, as well as quick-succession plantings, so that nothing has much time to turn bitter or bolt.
Does the idea of multiple plantings in summer make you head straight for the shade of that leafy tree to open a book?
For you, try the most adventurous route of all: Go see what’s already growing in your yard. Treat your herbs like hearty greens, adding them to your salad by the handful — basil, parsley, anise hyssop, mint, plus tangy nasturtium leaves from the flowerbed. Then such as redroot pigweed and lamb’s quarters. The latter even has a few cultivated relatives such as New Zealand spinach and the glamorous magenta spreen, named for its dusting of vibrant color. (It will often go to seed and come back the following summer unbidden as a bona fide weed.)
And don’t forget wild purslane, a heat-lover with crunchy little leaves — it’s surely already a regular invader of your summer garden. Like all these lettuce alternatives, it’s fine in salads, and fine tucked into all those sandwiches, too.
Damrosch is the author of “The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook”; her website is fourseason.farm.
