It's more complicated than just bed size. You eat salad 4-5 days per week, but how much is that? The point is, if you plant all of your salad mix at one time, it will all be ripening at the same time. If you just intend to do cut-and-come-again, that may work for you fine. If you want larger leaves, lettuce approaching head-size, you probably want to stagger your plantings.

You have probably read that you can seed some crops, like greens and peas, as soon as the soil can be worked. That means what it says. If you have a February thaw that that leaves your garden soil clear of snow (or no snow at all), go out and scratch some shallow furrows in your beds and plant. You have raised beds, so they should drain if you get further snow and rain, and you will get an early start on your garden.

Okay, start with 4-ft rows across your beds. I would seed 4 rows initially. If you are growing for baby greens make the rows 3 inches apart. Try to drop a seed every 3 inches. If you are growing for larger plants make your rows 4 inches apart and drop a seed every 4 inches. Barely cover with fine compost or used potting soil that you are recycling from last year's potted plants (okay, new potting soil if you have to). Figure the earliest planting will take longer to mature than later plantings, as the weather as the plants grow will be cooler. If you want a faster start, you can lay some row cover right over your planting. It will also retain moisture if you live in a dry climate, as I do.

As soon as you see green growth from your first planting, make 4 more furrows and plant them the same way. And you'll see green long before you think it is gardening season! When you see green in those 4 rows, plant another 4.

Next complication. Most greens hate hot weather and start to get tough, bitter, and not ideal just about when you are thinking salads are the only thing you want to eat. Here on my mountain side that is about the second week of June. And then many spring plants want to bolt to seed around mid summer (June 21 or so) anyway. You are Zone 6, so your hot weather probably comes before or around Memorial Day, I am guessing. If your salad mix has a maturity of 60 days, your last planting would be 60 days before hot weather sets in, or the last week of March if Memorial Day is your end date. Again, with cut-and-come-again culture, you will still be eating salads until they bolt.

Last planting in late March. That's probably long before you even considered planting your salad garden, right? Greens LIKE cool weather, really.

It works in the fall, too. Don't think about when your first frost is (that's the frost that turns the squash and tomato plants black and usually ends conventional gardens for the year), remember that greens LIKE cool weather. Salad greens will keep growing until a hard freeze, and that is surprisingly late under even a light row cover. In my climate the first frost can be around Sept 15, and the first hard freeze around Oct 15, but I can still be harvesting lettuce under row covers at Thanksgiving. Adjust your expectations to your own frost and freeze times.

In the fall, just as in the very early spring, the time to harvest/maturity is longer as the days get cooler. Also, some seeds are not going to germinate well until nights are cooler, say in the 60s or even 50s. I'm on a cool mountain side, so I start planting my fall crops in July, but I remember living on the flat-lands and the hot, hot nights. Be patient. If your first frost is Oct 15, count back 60 days and try planting in mid August (yeah, I know, still hot). If August is dry, water as needed to keep the soil damp until things start growing. In 2 weeks, plant some more, and some more in another 2 weeks. If your first hard freeze is Nov 15, cover your fall greens with a row cover and keep picking for a couple more weeks.

Check out Eliot Coleman's "Four-Season Harvest." We Americans have a very limited idea of early spring and late summer plantings to extend the harvest season. Coleman spent time in Europe at latitudes similar to much of the United States, where there are long traditions of planting cool-weather crops late for fall and winter harvest, or very early for spring harvest. We Americans have never cultivated the extended gardening habits (pun intended) of Europe, and instead tend to import warm-weather crops from Mexico and South America rather than enjoying cool-weather crops when the weather is cool. It's actually an interesting challenge, and surprisingly satisfying, to push the limits.

Good luck with your salad garden this spring. (Grow heat-loving beans and squash during the dead of summer, though.)

Catherine

Thanks for taking the time to post this! I do have a copy of The Four Season Harvest and I got it out this morning and had a look. Very helpful! I actually think that I might try succession planting with a few other things as well.

:)

Last year was my first year with an "official" garden.

I have 5-3x7 beds.

I planted out my greens and salad mixes a little less orderly than other plants (partly because an animal dug up one raised bed, so I doubled my sowing of lettuce seed), but it worked perfectly. I prefer baby greens, so I tried to stagger my plantings, as I think was mentioned above.

There are just two of us and we eat a lot of salad and so we planted around 3x5 feet of our main lettuce mix (sowing only a few sqft at a time, 2 or so weeks apart), plus we had about 6 random sq ft of other lettuces/arugula/spinach throughout late spring/summer. We didn't grow it in rows, rather just sprinkled seed very close together in sqft and we harvested as needed (cut and come). We ended up with A LOT of greens, but we ate most of it and only gave a little away.

So if you eat a lot of lettuce and want baby greens- I was suggest at least this much. A 4x4 bed sounds okay to me, if you would like baby greens and harvest as needed.

If you want larger heads, you'll need to space out your plants much more. Someone else might have more info on that method.

Hopefully that helps with your calculations for your family?

I'm attaching a link to my blog that has some pictures of our bed and greens. GOOD LUCK!

Here is a link that might be useful: Blog post with pictures