Even the big box stores have gotten into selling mesclun, also known as spring mix. It’s a challenge to compete with them, and price isn’t the way to do it. Unless you are growing a large amount of mesclun, you don’t want to get into that pricing war. What we, as market farmers, want to do is grow a quality mesclun that “they” can’t compete with on freshness and taste, and price it accordingly.

The word mesclun comes from the Provençal mesclom, mesclumo meaning mixture. Those words come from the Latin verb misculare meaning to mix thoroughly. In Provencal France, mesclun is a well-defined mixture of baby lettuces, sorrel, endive and arugula in precise proportions. However, in the U.S., it has a much looser definition. Typically, it has a base of baby lettuce, with additional ingredients that depend upon the season, the local climate, and the tastes of the intended customers.

Our recipe for profits
Let’s start with the lettuces. Quality mesclun will have several different lettuce types and colors. We tend to use Black Seeded Simpson as our base because it is relatively inexpensive in bulk, and has a nice color and texture. To start our seed mix, we use 4 ounces of BSS. The rest of the lettuces we use are in one-ounce amounts. To complement the green leaf, we add a red leaf – usually Red Sails. We also add both red and green bibbs – Buttercrunch and whatever Red is least expensive. Romaines give us a long, slim leaf for another shape, and we use Kalura, Rouge D’Hiver or Rosalita and Freckles, giving us some nice color as well.

Oakleaf lettuce really adds leaf shape interest, and we use Tango for our green and standard Red Salad Bowl for red. Finally, we add Lolla Rossa for the wonderful texture and loft that it adds to the mix. That gives us 17 ounces of mixed seed, costing around $25 and it will seed enough row feet (2100 or so) for 40 or more pounds of mesclun in one cutting.

We will also seed a few feet of Dark Lolla Rossa separately from the mix. We love its color and texture, but because it is so red, it grows (and re-grows) slowly, and would get lost in the mix. It does, however, hold its great color even in the short, gray days of winter.

Okay, now we have a beautiful lettuce base, but it’s a little bland. That may be fine with your customers, but if it isn’t, the greens we add to it can really make a difference. The first addition is arugula. Arugula has a nutty, somewhat sharp tasting strap shaped leaf (milder in cool weather, hotter in warm weather). We add it in small quantities, and also offer it in bunches for those more adventurous customers. Mizuna, a very mild Japanese mustard, is another basic for us. Cut in the baby stage, it is a beautiful medium green, with deep saw-toothed edges. It adds a nice taste, nice color, and gorgeous texture. Red Russian Kale adds texture, a lot of color, and, maybe more importantly, weight. It has a heavier leaf, and gives substance to the “flimsier” lettuces. We use Tat Soi for its beautiful, dark green, spoon-shaped leaves. It has a nice, mild taste, and is very heavy – good for getting the poundage up in the mix. It also sets off the lighter colors of the rest of the mix. Finally, we add small amounts of baby green and purple mustards. Most of our customers don’t want a spicy mesclun, so we’re careful not to add too much.

All the lettuce seeds (except the dark Lolla Rossa) are mixed together and heavily sowed in rows. The greens are seeded separately. One reason for this is that the greens grow much more quickly than lettuce and will shade it out and/or be ready to cut several days before the lettuce. So if you have them together in the row, and are cutting at the same time, the lettuce will be too small, or the greens too large. Another reason is it allows you to custom mix your mesclun for different customer tastes. For our mesclun, we will seed 70% lettuce, 20% various greens and 10% Dark Lolla Rossa.

This crop is going to be in and out quickly, so doesn’t take as much fertility as one that might take 60-90 days to harvest. But because we plan to either re-cut several times (winter) or re-seed several times (summer), we do pay close attention to soil fertility in our growing beds. We use a pelleted chicken manure product with a 3-4-3 analysis at the rate of 10 pounds per 100 square feet in our bed preparation. That will carry crops for 5- 6 months in our tunnels where leaching from rainfall isn’t a factor.

We grow mesclun in wide rows in our high tunnels, year-round. In the summer, we add shade cloth over the plastic for better quality. Growing this crop under protection makes it much cleaner than it would be outdoors, which simplifies post-harvest handling. To plant it, we first lay 4 drip-tape lines in a 42” bed. Then, we use an empty Earthway seeder to make a furrow on each side of each drip tape – 8 rows in all. That delineates where we’ll place the seed. Next, either by hand, or with a dial type seed sower set at opening 3, we place seed heavily in the row. We’ll have a 1 to 1.5 inch wide band – maybe 30 seeds to the inch or more. Once it’s seeded, we lightly cover the rows with a rake or hoe, and water in. What we are looking for with this heavy seeding is plants that will crowd out weeds in the row, and give us a handful at a time to cut. When it is ready to cut, the rows are thick enough that the leaves almost cover the middles.

Winter vs. summer
Mesclun will be ready to cut anywhere from 17 days from seeding in the middle of the summer to up to 6 weeks in the middle of the winter. It can be grown from seed almost any time during the year. During the cool months, it may be re-cut several times before quality declines and we turn it under. In the summer, it can only be cut once. We have seen Black Seeded Simpson bolt at just over 3 weeks in mid-summer! But the returns from it are terrific even with just one cutting.

Summer growing in our zone requires shading. The problem with shading is that the lower light “fades out” the reds. So, since the reds can be more expensive seed anyway, we adjust the seed mix to have green lettuces only, but several different leaf shapes and textures. We also find that the “greens” in the mix have a little too much insect pressure in the summer, so our mesclun becomes mixed lettuce only. The quality is definitely not as good as it is in cool weather, but our customers are too happy to be getting lettuce of any kind in the summer to complain!

The other management challenge to growing in the summer is timing of seeding. For us, it is ready on day 17, and too big by day 19. So, if we want to cut Thursday morning for Saturday’s market, we have to seed on Monday two weeks prior. After cutting, the crop is turned under. During mid-summer, we seed enough bed-feet for the quantity we want to take to market, EVERY Monday!

Pest control to postharvest
The pests we deal with on mesclun are few. Some of this is due to growing much of our crop during the winter months when pest pressure is naturally diminished. In winter, we see some aphids, but even those are few. During the summer, we have flea beetle pressure on the greens, so we don’t grow them. On the lettuce, in summer, we do have occasional caterpillar invasions. We use a B.t. (Bacillus thuringiensis) spray about four days before harvesting to combat them. The only other pest we encounter (besides the free-range hens that sometimes get in) is grasshoppers. In the tunnels, they show up about mid-February. If you live in a state that allows it (we don’t), Nosema locusta is a good biological control.

Harvesting on a small scale is definitely hand work. We use a sharp pair of scissors. With the heavy seeding, each clip of the scissors gives us a nice handful of mesclun. We harvest in the cool of the day – usually morning – into plastic bins. A 28-quart bin will hold 3.5 to 4 pounds of mesclun. We then put the lid on, and put it in a cool place until we have finished cutting.

Once we’ve finished cutting, we wash it. We have purchased a commercial salad spinner for this process. It has a five gallon capacity, a manual crank and can be purchased for under $200 at most restaurant supply houses. We put the mesclun into the inner basket – filling it about 2/3 full. Then we dunk the inner basket into cool clean water. We use a large trash can that is reserved for washing produce. We swish the basket around a few times, lift out and let drain, then spin dry. The leaves are then dumped into a larger plastic bin. After several batches have been washed and spun, we pack into 1-gallon food storage bags, each holding 8 ounces. The bags go into yet another plastic bin, which is refrigerated until time of sale.

This is definitely not the only way to wash and dry mesclun. Many people use a mesh bag to wash the leaves. A good example can be found at this University of Wisconsin site: http://cecommerce.uwex.edu/pdfs/A3704-2.PDF. Some growers will spin this around by hand, or use the spin cycle on a washing machine to remove the water. The salad spinner is great for a medium sized operation, the washer for a larger one, and a small (and young) grower might spin by hand. A market grower in Virginia puts his in a laundry basket, suspended from a tree limb with ropes, winds it up (remember doing this on swings?), and it spins out the water as it unwinds. There are lots of ways to spin the mesclun; the important thing is to get most of the water out of it.

Drier mesclun has better storage life and storage life is one of the things we can do better than the big box stores.

So, there it is in a nutshell. Grow some greens – your customers will love you for it, and you’ll love the cash!

Paul and Alison Wiediger have 2.5 acres of vegetable production, 8500 square feet of high tunnels and a greenhouse operation on their 84-acre diversified farm in Edmonson County, Kentucky. Their book about growing in high tunnels, Walking to Spring, is available for $15 plus $4 shipping from GFM, PO Box 3747, Lawrence, KS 66046; 800-307-8949; www.growingformarket.com