Salad greens for iceberg-melting summer days

Hot summer days call for light, simple meals that don't need cooking. You want a plate of sandwiches and a tossed salad, eaten under a tree.

But if your idea of salad is a bowl of lettuce, the garden may fail you even as it overflows with tomatoes and beans. Heat is hard on a lettuce crop. Poor germination, mold in humid weather and premature bolting can make you give up on it just when you want it the most.

A few garden tricks can help, such as germinating lettuce indoors, growing it under shade cloth in humus-rich, moisture-retentive soil and keeping it watered. You might choose the crisper, sturdier Batavian lettuces that hold up better in heat - varieties such as Nevada and Muir. Israeli-bred Jericho, a romaine, is another good choice. But the frilly or buttery types must wait for cooler weather.

A more adventurous solution is to try other greens. Consider a Swiss chard called Erbette, a beautifully mild and tasty crop that's fairly summer-proof. In salads, its narrow-stemmed leaves are best at a size no bigger than your hand; cut them and new ones will grow. Beet greens, picked small, are also salad-worthy, whether grown as a leaf crop or as trimmings from a row of beetroots.

Don't stop there. Experiment with something new like Malabar spinach, a handsome red-stemmed vine such as succulent leaves that thrive on heat - or the equally gorgeous red-veined sorrel, which adds a lemony taste to salads. Try purple orach, too, with its tender foliage, rich in antioxidants.

Pam Dawling, writing in the current issue of Growing for Market magazine, lists some leaf crops she grows in summer at the Twin Oaks Community in Louisa, Va. She likes the various vegetable amaranths, which come in green, red and even green striped with red. (Evergreenseeds.com has a wide selection.)

Dawling also recommends Asian greens such as mizuna, komatsuna, yukina savoy and mild, non-heading Asian cabbages such as Tokyo Bekana and Maruba Santoh. In my experience these are great in salads when picked young.

In general, the best strategy for summer greens is a mixture of cut-and-come-again harvests, as well as quick succession plantings, so that nothing has much time to turn bitter or bolt.

Does the idea of multiple plantings in summer make you head straight for the shade of that leafy tree to open a book? If so, try the most adventurous route of all: Go see what's already growing in your yard. Treat your herbs like hearty greens, adding them to your salad by the handful - basil, parsley, anise hyssop and mint, plus tangy nasturtium leaves from the flower bed. Then go on a prowl for tasty summer weeds such as redroot pigweed and lamb's quarters. The latter even has a few cultivated relatives such as New Zealand spinach and the glamorous magenta spreen, named for its dusting of vibrant color. (It will often go to seed and come back next summer unbidden as a bona fide weed.)

And don't forget wild purslane, a heat-lover with crunchy little leaves - surely a regular invader of your summer garden. Like all these lettuce alternatives, it's fine in salads, and fine tucked into all those sandwiches, too.