In winter I really enjoy having a large variety of fresh garden greens for salads or cooking. Colder weather to me means time to plant salad greens. In my twenty years of gardening here, I have found that successful cold weather gardening comes from the right seed selection and using a floating row cover to keep bugs off. The best varieties are those specifically selected for winter weather and shorter day lengths. Seed catalogs will say "over-winters nicely" or "can handle snow."

Here's what I plant directly in my garden under garden cloth on hoops:

Seeds Blum: (Addressed are in the box at the end of this article) French Swiss chard, Bloomsdale spinach which overwinters nicely, even in snow, and Cold Resistant Savoy spinach which is ready to eat in 50 days and slow to bolt in the spring.

From Shepherd's Seed Co: Nordic spinach which can be cut like lettuce or the outer leaves can be used for a constant winter supply and Paros Swiss chard which was developed in France for its mild sweet flavor.

From Nichols: North Pole lettuce, a great overwintering butterhead bred for winter gardening has great compact light green heads with great resistance to cold. This lettuce will bolt when warm spring weather comes.

From Bountiful Gardens: Little Gem Cos Romaine lettuce, often considered the best tasting of all lettuces, no waste, thick tight tender heads that can stand in the garden for a while and still be tender.

I plant locally bought Vates and Georgia collards seeds. From the Tsang and Ma Asian Seeds catalog, I planted Japanese Daikon radish. These mild and sweet winter radishes are easy to grow and produce 18 inch long tender roots.

I found some new-to-me winter greens in the Vermont Bean and Seed Co. They are all very fast growing (harvest in 45 days) miniature leafy oriental cabbages that thrive in the cold. Santoh, eaten raw or steamed, has somewhat spicy, pure white celery-like stalks with a broad green leaf. Tsoi Sim has tender bright green leaves on juicy stems and the whole plant, including the flowers, is tasty. Mei Qing Choi has top quality very tender leaves which are delicious when added to vegetable or meat dishes. Kintsai has a nice celery flavor.

The best selection of winter greens is in the Cook's Garden catalog. Artie King lettuce, crisp and early maturing, is grown from early fall through a cold winter for the earliest spring crop. Also, Cos Winter Density lettuce tolerates frost and is slow to bolt in the spring, and has sweet flavored, large rounded heads that are tightly folded, good and crisp. Cook's Garden also sells seed packets of mixtures of cold hardy, short day, fall and winter lettuces.

If you've never planted a winter garden before, give it a try. You'll be surprised how well we in Cochise County can garden four seasons a year!