Grow Your Own Salad Mix

Bag salad mixes are extremely popular in the grocery store, but its easy to grow your own. Home gardeners can find lots of different colors, textures, and flavors available.

For more information, visit our website at www.kansasgreenyards.org.
Produced by K-State Research and Extension.

Transcript:
Grow Your Own Salad Mix

In Kansas, you can have salad greens for a large part of the year. You can start planting them in March, and have salad greens all the way through May – even into June – depending on our weather. And then you can start planting them again in early to mid August. And then keep planting and harvesting all the way through at least the end of October.

This mix right here in front of me is what I call a spicy greens mix. It has lots of mustards, Asian greens; it’s got a little bit of choy, and some different leaf shapes and textures. They just add a lot of spice and color to a salad.

This mix here does have a little bit of lettuce in it. It also has a lot of kale – a little bit of that brassica flavor – not quite as spicy as a mustard plant. But, it still has a different texture and flavor.

You can see it has an edible type of chrysanthemum green – a little bit of a bitter green. So that’s something that can be added in.

And you can see back here some red-ribbed dandelion – an Italian type of dandelion. And again – a little bit more of a bitter green and very cold hardy.

This salad mix here is an all lettuce mix. It’s like a red and green salad mix with different textures and colors. You can see we have green romaine type leaves, some red leaves, and then some really dark red frilly shaped leaves.

So, lettuces have lot of different textures, and they have lots of different flavors, too. Some are stronger, and some have buttery flavors. And the great thing for a homeowner is that you can try it, and if you don’t like it, you can pick something else and plant it again. Because, you can plant lettuces multiple times in a year.

This feature story prepared with Rebecca McMahon, Kansas State University Research and Extension Horticulture Agent, Sedgwick County. For more information, visit your local county extension office or visit our website at KansasGreenYards.org.