Salad From the Garden Ten Months a Year Starts With These

Ten months of salad is eight small sowings, and one variety bolts, sulks or bores you halfway through - a variety pack rotates butterheads for spring, crisp romaines for early summer, oakleafs for heat, winter density for the cold frame. A pinch every two weeks is the whole discipline.

Sow a pinch, not a packet - forty lettuces maturing together is forty regrets.

Lettuce bolts bitter the week soil hits eighty degrees, which is why store salad rules July - unless the bed wears forty-percent shade cloth over hoops, dropping soil temperature ten degrees and stretching sweet harvests six more weeks. Forty is the salad number: cooler, not cave-dark.

Over the hoops from the season-extension kit - same frames, summer duty.

The productivity trick of a salad bed is cutting loose-leaf rows an inch above the crown so they regrow - three or four harvests per sowing - and a serrated knife takes a swath in one stroke where scissors nibble. Clean cuts regrow; ragged tears brown.

Morning harvest, straight to cold water - lettuce cut at noon is pre-wilted.

Garden lettuce needs an actual wash (garden included: grit, the odd passenger) and wet leaves both shrug off vinaigrette and slime in storage. The spinner is the bridge from bed to bowl - wash, spin, and suddenly the homegrown salad is crisper than the restaurant's. The big one; garden harvests embarrass the small one.

Spin, then store IN the spinner in the fridge - it doubles as the crisper.

The difference between salad-when-you-remember and salad-daily is prep: washed spun leaves in a vented keeper box hold crisp for a week, which makes the garden bowl the EASY option on a Tuesday night. The boxes' vent-and-reservoir design actually is better than a bag and a hope.

One box washed-ready, one box in the bed - the two-box rhythm feeds the week.