Early salads

The snow has finally melted in the back yard and the soil is still a little to wet to work, but we are already enjoying lots of green salads, courtesy of our cold frame. We use a method in which we plant seedlings in a 4' x 8' wooden cold frame in the fall, and then put a hoop house over the cold frame. This extra layer of insulation allows the plants to survive the winter and thrive once the days get longer and the sun rises higher in the sky. You can read about this method of winter gardening in Eliot Coleman's "Four Season Harvest".

The plants you see in the left side were seeded on Sept. 29 last fall and the ones on the right side were seeded in mid-February of this year. Not any plant can be overwintered like this in a cold frame. The plants we're currently using for our winter greens are spinach, arugula, cress, mizuna and mache, which are all cold-hardy and can withstand temperatures as low as 10 degrees.

A cold frame like this can supply two people with small salads throughout the winter and big salads once the weather warms up in March and April and the plants take off. It may seem like a lot of work to go through to get salad greens that you could buy in the store in the winter, but even the organic greens available are tasteless compared to what you'll harvest out of your own back yard cold frame.