Greens to Match Your Market
Greens are quick, easy crops that can be grown year-round to meet the constant demand for them. Greens can become one of the foundation crops on which a market farm depends; with proper scheduling, they will bring in steady income without a lot of fuss.
The word "greens" includes many leafy green plants (and a few that are gold and purple). They are vitamin-rich and important in many cuisines around the world. Many types are best grown in the cool weather of spring and fall, and in the winter hoophouse, but there are others that can be planted and harvested throughout the summer.
The key to success with greens is to match your production to your market, then educate customers to increase sales. Here are three approaches to growing greens, based on local market conditions and some tips for creating your own salad program:
Arugula: The Perfect Introductory Green
If you sell in an area where lettuce is the most exotic green, begin your greens program by offering
arugula. This spicy/peppery
green is popular throughout the United States and is increasingly available in supermarkets, either alone or as part of a salad mix. The flavor gets stronger as leaves increase in size.
There are two types of arugula, the salad type and the wild type. The salad type has broad leaves, a vigorous growth rate, and is ready for harvest in 21 to 40 days from direct seeding. It can be sold in the baby leaf stage as a salad green or grown to maturity for bunching. The wild type, Sylvetta, typically has narrow, lobed leaves and a slower growth rate, requiring 50 days to harvest. It is more pungent and therefore more suitable for mixing with other greens in a salad mix.
Arugula should be direct seeded, then covered immediately with lightweight row cover to exclude flea beetles which can destroy a crop in a day or two.
Cross sell arugula with cherry tomatoes as a summer salad idea, or suggest that it be dressed simply with olive oil, salt, and good-quality Parmesan cheese. Arugula should not be cooked, but it is often wilted by adding it just before serving to pizza, pasta, and omelets.
Step Up Your Greens Offerings
If you sell in an area where arugula is familiar and lettuce is old news, incorporate
Asian greens and
mache. Asian greens add color, flavor, and weight to salad mix. Combine with arugula, lettuce, chicory, and herbs such as parsley or basil for mesclun mix. Grown to full size, Asian greens work well in stir fry. Cross sell with carrots, cilantro, peppers, and onions as a stir-fry starter.
Mache is a cool weather crop that is very popular in Europe and gaining enthusiasts in the U.S. It thrives in the late fall, winter, and early spring. In mild areas, it may be field grown and harvested throughout the winter. In northern areas it grows well in a hoophouse or caterpillar tunnel. Time plantings to have product available for winter holidays, when it is a desirable salad ingredient. That means planting in late September for harvest beginning at Thanksgiving. Mache is easy to grow, but tough to clean. Rinse harvested rosettes gently to avoid bruising the leaves.
Offer Unique Specialty Greens to High-end Markets
There is no limit to what you can do with greens in high-end and ethnic markets. But creativity is key. Create a unique salad mix by using
specialty greens that change with the seasons. Incorporate
edible flowers such as pea blossoms, violets, borage, calendula, bachelor's button, and nasturtium. Assemble mixed greens bunches for sautés, including any of the Asian greens, mustards, kale, Swiss chard, and mini broccoli.
Include greens in micro mixes, where their wide range of shapes and colors and mild heat add color, loft, and flavor.
Greens can be marketed at farmers markets and CSAs, especially if you provide recipes and nutritional information. Asian and Southern restaurants may be good channels for greens, as are supermarkets and wholesalers.
Many greens are brassicas and will benefit from a lightweight row cover to protect them from flea beetles and other typical spring brassica pests. Most do best in the cool weather of spring and fall, but some are more heat-tolerant:
Yukina Savoy, which has large, crinkled leaves;
Mei Qing Choi, a mini, green-stem
Pac Choi; and
Joi Choi, a heavy, white-stem Pac Choi.
Mustard greens in general will do better in summer than the Asian greens.
In addition, several other species of greens are heat-tolerant and good for spring and summer planting.
Red Leaf Vegetable Amaranth is a Caribbean specialty green, often used in soups.
Malabar Spinach is a climbing vine with tender leaves that are a summer substitute for spinach.
Magenta Spreen is a Chenopodium, similar to Lamb's Quarter in flavor and appearance.
Purslane, which has succulent leaves, is popular in Latin American cuisine and is available in golden and red varieties.
Create Customer Loyalty with Custom Salad mixes
Just as greens can become a foundation crop for a farm, so can salad mix. Customers eat salads year-round, so it makes sense to devote some effort to your own salad program. By experimenting with varieties, scheduling, and production methods, you will be able to offer salad mix over a long season.
If you are just beginning, you can minimize the learning curve by planting Johnny's salad mix blends, available as
all-lettuce mixes and
all-greens mixes. Both can be harvested in 3-6 weeks. However, lettuce takes about a week longer than greens, so plant a lettuce mix first and then 5-7 days later, plant a greens mix. You should also cover the greens mix with lightweight row cover to exclude flea beetles. Both lettuce and greens mixes will be ready at the same time and you can combine them after you harvest and wash them.
By using a premixed blend, you can get a feel for the production considerations. Keep good notes: amount of seed planted, spacing, planting and harvest dates, amount harvested. That information will help you make adjustments next time you plant. You may want to direct seed and harvest by hand at first, but if you find a strong market for your salad mix, consider investing in specialized tools:
Johnny's Tilther makes fine seedbeds for direct seeding small seeds of lettuce and greens, and a pinpoint seeder is useful for evenly spacing seeds in dense plantings. For harvesting salad mix, consider a
serrated greens knife for small plantings or
Johnny's Greens Harvesters for larger plantings.
Once you have the basic salad mix mastered, you may want to switch to choosing your own varieties and growing them individually, then mixing them together postharvest into a pleasing combination. The advantage to designing your own mixes is that you can accommodate customer preference and make seasonal adjustments. Also, you can save money by purchasing individual varieties.
A profitable salad mix will have several colors and shapes of lettuces for a mild flavor; baby greens for intense color, stronger flavor, and greater weight and loft; and some "signature" additions such as tender baby herbs and edible flowers. Besides being pretty, a salad mix should have a good "mouth feel," which means not too many stems or hard to swallow. And, of course, flavor should be interesting but not overpowering. Making your own salad mix is a creative endeavor!
Your final consideration in growing salad mix must be washing and postharvest handling. Always use safe, potable water for washing all produce. Customers are accustomed to supermarket mixes that are triple-washed and ready-to-eat, so you may need to remind them to wash salad mix again before eating. Leaves should be spun dried gently to prevent bruising them, and salad mix should be kept refrigerated at 41˚F to as low as 33˚F for food safety and the longest storage life.
Begin by scouting regularly; at least once a week, walk your fields and inspect all your crops for pest damage. Don't just look from a distance -- get up close and check on the overall health of the plants. Turn over leaves to scout for eggs, aphids, and other potential problems. With root crops, pull up a few plants to be sure they are developing normally. Any time you find a problem, you need to quickly identify its source and determine whether it's a real threat to your crop.
With the problem identified, your next step is to choose appropriate controls. The presence of an insect pest doesn't always require action; natural enemies may take care of the problem for you if it's not severe. Low-cost home remedies may be effective, such as milk for powdery mildew control. 
Once you have the current pest problem under control, think strategically about how to avoid a repeat occurrence. Many factors contribute to pest outbreaks and crop damage, so assess whether you could do a better job in these areas:
Johnny's community of growers on Facebook to connect with others for advice, share your growing stories, and learn about the latest growing tips and Johnny's promotions. When we reach 13,000 "likes" and we'll share a FREE STANDARD SHIPPING* offer code that will be valid for 5 days (US addresses only). To like us on Facebook, hit the "like" button underneath the large cover photo.
Here are some facts about lettuce that may surprise you: It is the most valuable vegetable crop in the United States, with sales of $2.2 billion in 2010. (Fresh tomatoes were a distant second at $1.4 billion.) Lettuce alone accounts for 19% of all fresh vegetable sales in the U.S. Iceberg lettuce is still the dominant type, accounting for 53% of total lettuce sales, but its popularity has been dropping. Meanwhile other types of head lettuces and salad mixes have been steadily increasing in popularity.
Markets for head lettuce are numerous. Farmers markets, CSAs, restaurants, and supermarkets are all potential buyers for head lettuce. Johnny's research team has devised a head lettuce planting program to help you choose appropriate varieties for each season. We have decades of experience trialing lettuce varieties to identify characteristics such as heat and cold tolerance, disease resistance, and growth rate. Taking those factors into consideration, we recommend specific varieties for growing in spring, summer, and fall. The lettuce program encompasses all types and colors of head lettuce so you can cater to specific markets and trends. We suggest the best varieties of each major type of head lettuce.
Many experienced growers prefer to create their own signature mixes of colors and textures. They plant individual lettuce varieties, adjusting planting schedules based on experience, to allow for uniform harvest. Separate plantings allow for custom blending to meet customer preferences as well as reducing the likelihood of a total crop failure if one variety is more susceptible to disease. Johnny's offers 16 organic varieties and 7 nonorganic varieties of lettuces recommended for baby leaf production.
Lettuce has a relatively short shelf life, so the key to profitability is to grow just what you can sell, to start seeds at appropriate times for transplant, and to schedule multiple successions. Johnny's precision seeders are tools designed for both greenhouse and field application. They range from the single-row Glaser seeder, which is suitable for lettuce head production if seeding in the field, to the Four-Row and Six-Row Seeders for making dense plantings of baby leaf lettuce both in the greenhouse or field. We have a wide selection of growing and planting tools and supplies. And check out our new harvest and seedling cart to get your flats of plants out to the field and your harvested lettuce back to the packing shed.
High tunnels are without a doubt one of the most beneficial capital improvements a vegetable farmer can make. But a commercial-grade high tunnel is expensive. You may be able to get grant from USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service to pay much of the cost of a high tunnel, and if you're interested in pursuing that option, you can read more about the program below.
AgSquared is a new, web-based software program designed specifically for small farmers. It offers a suite of tools that will help you make your crop plans and follow through on them throughout the season. With support from Johnny's, AgSquared is offering a free three-month trial of the software, which will be available by subscription the rest of this year for $4 per month.
Johnny’s has more than three dozen varieties of peppers, so you can choose specialties that meet the demands of your customers. You can cater to specific ethnic groups that may have trouble finding their favorite peppers in supermarkets. You can encourage customers to try new peppers by providing recipes and preparation suggestions.
The popularity of pelleted seeds continues to grow among market farmers and serious gardeners, and Johnny’s now offers 80 varieties that are available pelleted. Pelleting is a process in which small or irregularly shaped seeds are coated with an inert material to make them round and uniform. The benefits of pelleting are numerous:
For an earlier start to the tomato season, try Rebelski (a.k.a. DRW 7749), the best greenhouse tomato we have found for the fresh market. These beautiful, slightly ribbed red slicers have the great flavor and texture of field-grown tomatoes, yet they can be produced in a hoophouse or greenhouse.
This year, Johnny's exclusively offers two great plum tomatoes. Granadero is an Organic hybrid plum tomato that produces very high yields of uniform, delicious 4-5 oz. tomatoes for sauces, salsas, and salads.
Another way to diversify your production is to offer products that are compatible with tomatoes, even though they may not be as high volume. Then you can cross-market the two, and increase the value of each sale. A prime example is eggplant, which is often paired with tomatoes in recipes. Eggplant is so strikingly beautiful that it pulls customers in to your stand to admire its sleek good looks. Johnny's has eggplants in every shape and color, including a few that your customers may not even recognize as eggplants. In addition to the familiar shiny, dark purple cylindrical fruits, you can grow eggplants that are light green, egg-shaped, lavender, and striped. You probably won't sell eggplant in the same quantities as tomatoes, but if you have them available, customers are likely to buy them from you while buying tomatoes.
experience, they tend to add new crops and markets and extend their seasons. They find ways to maximize income from everything they grow and put all their land to good use.
A market farm by definition grows a wide variety of crops to sell locally. Even so, there may be other crops you have not previously grown that you could add to your mix.
Succession cropping is an important component of diversification. You can have several successions of a crop by planting several varieties with different days to maturity. Or you can plant the same variety several times, a few weeks apart. If one fails, you haven't lost a lot of time in trying to replace it. You can also diversify by extending the season with the use of hoophouses, greenhouses, and low tunnels. Using season extension structures also reduces risk by providing protection from bad weather.
Community Supported Agriculture is holding its own despite the economic downturn. In fact, demand is so strong that many CSA farms have started offering winter shares for members who want to eat local year-round. A winter CSA is a much different endeavor than a summer CSA, and it takes a lot of planning. If you are thinking about ways to build on the success of your current CSA, expanding into winter is the logical next step.
Some vegetables can maintain freshness for months after harvest if you choose varieties specifically bred for long storage. Here's a list of some of the varieties we recommend for storage throughout fall and winter.
With the inexpensive protection of a
So the pump is primed...you just need to provide a reminder, some guidance, and an abundance of produce. Here are some suggestions for encouraging your customers to buy in bulk.
If you would like to extend the season and increase annual revenue significantly, consider offering value-added products in addition to your fresh produce. You will find that selling even a few non-perishable products can level out income and open doors to new markets. Winter markets, holiday craft shows, local specialty shops, and internet selling sites all offer opportunities for making money after your growing season ends.