Pick Crops to Expand Your Hot-Weather Menu

As hot summer weather arrives, many spring greens start to bolt. When they bolt (when they send up flower stalks) they stop producing tender leaves. It’s game over.

Find out how to slow down lettuce bolting.

One way to harvest a steady supply of green leaves over the summer months is with succession crops. Make ongoing plantings of bolt-prone crops such as lettuce, spinach, and arugula. (Look for heat-tolerant lettuces.)

Here's more about succession crops.

But there's another way to get a steady supply of summer salads: Grow heat-tolerant greens.

If you want hot-weather greens, keep reading. (And at the end I share a favourite garnish for a mid-summer salad!) As warm weather arrives, add some of these other leafy greens to the garden to spruce up your salads:

Amaranth
Beet greens
Malabar spinach
Sorrel
Swiss chard

5 Leafy Greens for Summer Heat

Here are five of my favourite heat-tolerant greens for the summer garden.

Amaranth Leaves

Amaranth is easy to grow and thrives in the heat. It loves hot summers!

Amaranth is a versatile plant and a great choice for spots where you want to weave together the edible and ornamental. It's grown for its edible seeds, its ornamental uses, and for its edible leaves.

The leaves can be eaten raw when young. They taste a bit like spinach. Use larger leaves cooked, in soups and stews.

This is a crop that confidently self-seeds. Grow it once, and you're set for upcoming years. As little amaranth seedlings pop up in my veggie patch, I curate—I pull out some of the small amaranth plants for the salad bowl, and leave a few to grow where I want larger amaranth plants.

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Beet Leaves

Steal a few leaves from the beet patch to add to summer salads.

As I make salads with summer greens, I like to steal a few small leaves from the beet patch.

Beet greens are edible. Use young leaves raw in salad, and cook larger leaves. (I add mature leaves to borsch. Here's Mom's borsch recipe.) Eaten fresh, these young leaves have a slightly earthy taste, like their kin, Swiss chard.

Even though I grow this crop for its root, taking a few small leaves is no problem; just don't take them all from one plant.

There's one beet variety that I grow especially for its leaves: 'Bulls Blood' has vibrant red leaves that add nice colour to a bowl of summer greens.

Malabar Spinach

Malabar spinach (Basella alba) thrives in the heat of summer. This vining plant usually takes off as the regular spinach starts to wane in the heat.

Malabar spinach, despite the name, is of no relation to spinach. It has fleshy, mucilaginous leaves that you can eat raw or add to a stir fry. You can also use it to thicken soups.

Best of all, this tropical plant keeps growing all summer long, through the heat.

I don't often see Malabar spinach plants at garden centres. If you want it, plan to grow it from seed. There is a green-leafed type, as well as a strikingly beautiful red-leafed type.

Malabar spinach is also a great crop for vertical gardening. Find out how to save space by adding vertical crops to your garden.

Sorrel

This is a favourite in our garden. Sorrel is a perennial leafy green crop that's up early in the spring. It keeps producing tender leaves all summer long.

Sorrel has a tangy taste. I think of it as a lemon substitute for northern gardeners. Add sorrel leaves to a mixed green salad—or when making a sauce add in sorrel, and as the leaves cook into the sauce they add a citrusy tang.

Here's a recipe for sorrel soup.

Garden sorrel (Rumex acetosa) is what you'll find at garden centres. I like ‘Profusion’ garden sorrel, a large-leaved variety that doesn’t bolt.

If you're a forager, you might find sheep sorrel (Rumex acetosella). Both are edible, though I wouldn't plant sheep sorrel in a home garden...it's a spreader.

(There's also a weed called wood sorrel. It's part of the oxalis clan, with clover-like leaves. It's edible too...but I'm not proposing you grow it—it shows up on its own.)

Swiss Chard

This is my favourite summer green. Swiss chard is a work horse; pick heavily and continually all summer and it keeps growing.

Unlike lettuce and spinach, it doesn't try to flower in its first year. That’s because it has a two-year life cycle...and that makes it a very valuable heat-tolerant green.

When picked young, the small leaves can go straight into the salad. I like larger leaves and the more substantial leaf rib in stir-frys.

Along with green varieties, there are many colourful ones that paint the veg patch a rainbow of colours.

Enjoy playing with colour, texture, and shapes?

Don’t want a cookie-cutter veggie garden?
If you've thought of growing more of your own food, but you don’t know what to do next, Edible Garden Makeover gives you the ideas, knowledge, and inspiration to grow food in a way that fits your yard and your style.

One More Hot-Weather Crop

Here’s a crop that doesn’t fit into my list of hot-weather salad greens because we cook it. But I’m including it in this post because it’s a fantastic garnish for a summer salad, and it has great heat tolerance.

Squash Tips

Squash shoot tips, squash tendrils, and squash leaves are all edible.

But…cook them briefly. A quick sauté in olive oil does the trick. That’s because when they’re not cooked, they’re a wee bit prickly. But cooked, they’re transformed.

Squash has many edible parts on the same plant: There's the fruit, the flowers, tender stems, and then the leaves and tips. You can cook larger leaves too, but harvest them before they’re too fibrous.

Find out about other crops with more than one edible part.

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