The weather is getting hot, so we thought it might be a good time to highlight some of our favorite heat tolerant greens for those summer salads. As you might know, most typical salad greens are cool weather, short day crops. They do not perform well in intense heat, and the long days make them prone to bolting.
Though plant breeders have made huge strides in breeding more summer friendly lettuce varieties, the reality is that for most home gardeners summer lettuce is often a very disappointing endeavor. By the time you have tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers to eat, your lettuce is long gone. However, if you are willing to step away from the traditional lettuce and spinach to eat some more exotic greens, you might just be able to eat a fresh salad with your ripe tomatoes.
It is important to keep your greens well watered to help reduce their stress. Additionally, it can be very helpful if you can provide your greens some shade to help keep them cool. Afternoon shade is best. Growing them under shade cloth can also help extend your season. We have also had good luck growing greens underneath an ‘A’ shaped trellis planted with pole beans. The beans provide some dappled shade to help keep the soil cool.
There are 4 greens we typically plant as summer salad greens. Mustards, chards, beets, and sweet potatoes.
Mustard greens
One of the reasons mustard greens are so great is that there is so much variance within this group of plants. There are cold hardy ones, heat tolerant ones. Spicy ones, mild ones. There is pretty much a mustard green for every person, every season, and every occasion. This means that you have to pick your mustard green varieties carefully. You might have to do some trial and error testing to determine just which varieties suit you and your environment best. There will likely be some winners and some real losers.
We don’t much like spicy greens here, so look for mild flavored greens. Our two favorite heat tolerant mustards are Tendergreen and Savanna Hybrid. They are productive and reliable for us.
Tendergreen, true to its name, is very tender. The leaves are soft and fragile similar to lettuce or spinach. It is a perfect salad green substitute. Tendergreen maintains its very mild flavor even as the temperatures warm. It is heat and drought tolerant. It matures quickly, so you can be harvesting a crop within 30-40 days of planting (either spring or fall). Additionally, it will readily germinate and grow in the mid-late summer when soil temperatures are still high. This sets it apart from many cool season crops that fail to germinate in warm soils.
Savanna Hybrid is also very mild flavored, though the leaves are a thicker, coarser texture than Tendergreen. This particular variety is very slow to develop the bitter, sharp taste that greens get when exposed to too much heat. Savanna Hybrid produces a very uniform crop that holds well in your garden. Plus they are drought tolerant, cold tolerant, and excellent for repeated harvests.
Chards
Chards are another group of plants that are variable, though they do not vary near as much as mustards. Chards are biennials, meaning their lifecycle takes 2 seasons to complete. Because of this, they will not try to bolt on you during the summer. We find that they do well for us as both salad and cooking greens well into the summer.
The problem we usually run into with chards is fungal/bacterial leaf spot making the leaves undesireable for eating. This inevitably occurs at some point after the weather turns hot. Usually, they will survive through the worst of the summer heat though. Then we can cut down the plants and dispose of all of the plant material as the weather cools. At this point they will quickly regrow healthy new leaves for fall harvest.
While you can grow Swiss Chard in the summer months, our favorite summer chard variety is ‘Perpetual Chard’ also sometimes called ‘Perpetual Spinach’ It tastes somewhat similar to spinach, and unlike Swiss chards, it has somewhat small green stems and smooth leaves. It does have leaf spot problems, but we find that it takes much longer to succumb than Swiss chard. This combined with its continued mild flavor allows us to harvest it well into July.
Beet Greens
We love to grow beet greens. They are our favorite green any time of the year. Fortunately, they are both cold and heat tolerant. Though they would prefer moderate temperatures, they will take temperatures down into the low 20’s and also temperatures up into the 90’s. They have a mild, slightly ‘beety’ flavor, and make an excellent substitute for lettuce or spinach for salads.
Beets and Chard are very closely related. They are actually both the same genus and species, Beta vulgaris. Unfortunately this means that they have the same summer leaf spot problem that chard gets. The nice thing about beets is that about the time that the greens are getting to ugly to eat, the roots are reaching mature size for harvest.
Our personal favorite, and the only beet we grow, is ‘Bulls Blood’. Bulls Blood beet greens are a gorgeous, rich burgundy color, and they are bursting with flavor and nutrients. We choose to grow Bulls Blood over other varieties because the leaves are tender and delicious at any age or stage of growth.
Many beets selected mainly for root production only have tender leaves at the baby size. The mature leaves are too tough and stringy to eat raw. This means that you usually only get 1 green harvest from them when you are thinning the crop. Not so with Bull’s Blood. You can pick off the larger outer leaves to use in salads right up to the day that you harvest the beets. They will still be tender and perfect for salads. We typically plant a large crop of Bulls Blood early in the spring and harvest them as needed for salads into July at which point we harvest the roots.
Sweet Potato
In more northern climates it is likely that these other greens would easily carry you through the entire summer. Unfortunately, July and August here are extremely hot, and even our heat tolerant greens are struggling or failing by the end of July. At this point we have found that we can switch over to eating sweet potato leaves. Yes, that’s right, sweet potatoes! They are the 4th thing we grow for summer greens. Actually we don’t specifically grow them for greens. We consider salads to be a byproduct of the root crop we are growing anyways.
By the time our other greens have succumbed to the heat, our sweet potatoes are thriving and putting out a ton of new foliage. These leaves are tender and mild flavored. We can meet our salad craving in the hottest days of summer by harvesting some of our sweet potato leaves with no harm or loss of production to the developing potatoes underground.
The drawback to using sweet potato leaves for salads is that the leaves are very flat, so they do not make a ‘fluffy’ salad like lettuce tends to do. However, they are extremely nutritious, and will taste much better than lettuce in 100 degree summer heat.
We hope that helps you to fill your salad craving when you have all those juicy tomatoes and crispy cucumbers ready to pick.
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