Spring salad bed

Lettuce, spinach, carrots, radishes and chives you can sow before your last frost. Pick leaves as you need them and re-sow every few weeks.

Bed size

4′ × 8′

Soil depth

12″

Layout

Traditional Gardening

Plants

170

Sun

Full sun in spring and fall; light afternoon shade extends the lettuce season into summer.

Sow everything 2–4 weeks BEFORE your last frost (start the lettuce indoors a month earlier, or buy transplants) — every crop here shrugs off light freezes. Re-sow lettuce, spinach, and radish every 2–3 weeks; the bed replants itself for fall.

What’s planted

• Nasturtium‘Dwarf Jewel Blend’

  2 plants · 18″ spacing
• Radish‘Cherry Belle’

  60 plants · 3″ spacing
• Loose-leaf lettuce‘Black Seeded Simpson’

  15 plants · 9″ spacing
• Spinach‘Bloomsdale Longstanding’

  10 plants · 9″ spacing
• Chives‘Chives’

  3 plants · 15″ spacing
• Carrot‘Chantenay’

  80 plants · 3″ spacing

Why these neighbors

• Chantenay carrot & Chives

  Allium scent masks the carrot-root-fly attractant that carrot foliage releases when thinned — the classic carrot-and-allium pairing, with the chive band sitting directly north of the main carrot block. Backed by extension trials; the chive flowers also pull in pollinators.

• Black Seeded Simpson lettuce & Cherry Belle radish

  Shallow-rooted lettuce shades the radish seedbed during germination; the radishes are pulled at 25 days before the lettuce needs the room. Every lettuce row carries a radish column for free.

• Bloomsdale spinach & Cherry Belle radish

  Spinach and radish pair well: shared cool-season culture, complementary root depths, radish out at 25 days before the spinach needs the room. Every spinach row here carries its own radish column for exactly this reason.

• Chantenay carrot & Cherry Belle radish

  Radish germinates in 3–5 days and marks the slow carrot rows (carrot can take 21); pulling the radishes at 25 days loosens the crust exactly where the carrot roots are sizing up.

Care notes

• No cilantro, dill, or parsley in this bed on purpose — all three should be kept away from carrots. All four are the same family (Apiaceae), so they share pests and diseases and compete for the same rooting zone. They live in the herb bed instead.
• Everything here is frost-tolerant: sow 2–4 weeks before last frost and again in late summer for a fall crop. The same layout works twice a year.
• Chives are perennial — plant them once at the band marked y=39 and they return for a decade. Their early-spring flowers are also the first beneficial-insect food in the garden.
• Chantenay is the right carrot for heavy or rocky soil: short, broad-shouldered roots that don't fork where long varieties would. If your bed is deep sandy loam, Nantes types work in the same 3" grid.
• Thin the carrot blocks ruthlessly at 2 inches tall — every skipped thinning is a twisted root. The thinnings are edible microgreens.
• Bolting lettuce turns bitter overnight in the first 80 °F week. Pull bolters, re-sow into the gap, and let one plant flower for the hoverflies.
• Re-sow each radish station every 2–3 weeks; at 25 days to maturity the columns produce 3–4 successions per season.