Harvesting Lettuce Salad Mix: Arugula and Mesclun

When you're hankering for a fresh salad, we have advice to help you harvest the greens you need from your garden.

TRANSCRIPT:

TERRY ALLAN: 
Hi, I’m Terry Allan with SEEDS OF CHANGE™ and today I’m going to show you how to harvest salad mix. I like to bring my salad spinner for washing the leaves afterwards right out to the garden with me and harvest right into the basket. 

This is a beautiful stand of fresh and prime ready-to-cut salad mix. This is our mesclun that’s got spicy arugula and lettuces mixed in. When you plant your salad mix, you can see that I have it in these four- to six-inch-wide bands, three across the bed. That allows me to weed in between. 

Every patch of salad mix is bound to get these — especially these — pigweed weeds. So, before you harvest and it gets too big, it’s good to pull these out. The good thing is, though, that wild amaranth, especially when it’s a baby like this, is edible — it won’t hurt you, although, it might be kind of chewy.

To cut your salad mix, pull out the weeds, grab a handful and using a sharp kitchen knife, give it a crew cut. When you cut just an inch to a half an inch above the growing points, this will all grow back again in a few weeks so you can continue to harvest salads from this plot. Just go down the row and give it a crew cut. Before you know it, you’ll have lots of salad mix.

This row is the regrowth in just one week.

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