Plant Salad Greens in Your Garden This Spring

If you are planning your spring garden, give thought to planting lettuce and other salad greens.

Lettuce varieties fall into four categories, says Mary Beth Musgrove, a horticulturist with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. The categories include Romaine or cos, crisphead, butterhead and loose leaf.

Loose leaf and Romaine are good varieties to grow in spring gardens inAlabama. Loose leaf types are the easiest and quickest to grow.

Lettuce can be established by seed or transplant, says Musgrove. Once soil temperatures warm to 55 F, lettuce seeds germinate in a few days. To get an earlier start, transplants can be grown 3 to 4 weeks before the last expected frost. If a late frost is expected, plan to cover the lettuce with a rowcover or simply replant if the plants are nipped by frost.

Lettuces prefer a soil pH between 6.5 and 6.8. Add lime to the soil if a soil test recommends it. Also, add organic matter to the soil to improve the soil's ability to retain moisture. You want soil that has good moisture-holding ability, but it should be well-drained. Poorly-drained soil can create disease problems.

Here are some lettuce varieties you might want try.

• Great Lakes is a good crisphead variety
• Buttercrunch is good flavor butterhead variety.
• Pirat is an excellent European butterhead variety and grows well. It has a slight bronze color on leaf tips.
• Little gem is a popular romaine lettuce
• Black seeded simpson, Simpson elite or Red sails are good loose leaf varieties.

Other salad greens that you might want to try growing include arugula, chicory, endive and corn salad.

Argula is a good spring-planted crop. This green has a hot spicy flavor and matures in 35 days. Harvest new leaves frequently because older leaves may have a bitter taste.

Chicory has a hard root that is ground and used as a coffee substitute in some areas. Radicchio, known as red or leaf chicory, performs best in the South. Because it has a long maturity period, this variety should be started from seed and transplanted. Giulio is a more compact variety and produces red and white leaves in about 70 to 80 days.

Endive is a long-maturing salad green with dark green curly leaves best grown in the fall garden unless you get an early start by setting out transplants. Harvest the whole plant at one time, says Musgrove. Salad king is a fast-maturing endive variety.

Corn salad is a variety of mache. It has small, spoon-shaped leaves and is sometimes called lamb's lettuce. It matures fast and is best harvested when it is young and tender.

Salad greens can be planted about two weeks prior to last frost. They can be planted in spaces around other crops. If a late frost occurs, cover salad greens with a row cover. Most salad greens prefer a soil pH of 6.5 to 6.8.