Salad Mix Creation and Improvement

Lettuce, Bixby and Untreated Gourmet Lettuce Mix

Osborne already offers three different salad mixes: two different Gourmet Lettuce Mixes and a Spicy Complement Mix. We created these to fulfill a demand for diverse baby salad leaves grown in one row, growing at complementary rates, and in a wide and balanced spectrum of colors and shapes. They satisfy the WSDA Green Book requirements for salad mixes, keeping growers from slipping over the vague line into 'processor'.

Every year we grow the mixes out in different seasons, cut them, watch them re-grow, and improve on the mixes. The components change over the years as we find better lettuces and baby leaves, and have to replace ones that are discontinued, unavailable, or have huge price increases.


This year we have been doing a re-vamp on our current mixes, and having lots of fun making new ones for you to try. You will find that the Organic and Untreated Gourmet Lettuce Mixes are improved- we made sure that all the lettuces in the mixes were competing equally in the mix, took out some that were being repressed, and added a few- the result are mixes that pop, are more uniform in height, and will look beautiful when cut. The Spicy Complement Mix has a few changes as well- increases and decreases of certain mustard, and some new additions-like Pink Orach.

New Brassica Mixes

We will be releasing a handful of new mixes this year to see what our growers like. These new mixes are in their final grow out test, and we are thinking up names and buying in the seed.





The process is a lot like scientific cooking...I spent lots of hours this summer at a table in the cool warehouse, surrounded by bags of seeds, weighing out and recording grams of this and that lettuce or green added to each mix. Every planting succession I created three to twenty renditions of the same mix, altering components or amounts. Then we would level the soil and plant a few feet of each mix. If something looked right, I would mix more with slight changes, and we would plant again, in longer rows.



I soon realized that knowing how quickly each green grew was going to speed up the whole process, so we planted all the possible components out and started taking notes.
And it still isn't a simple success. As anyone knows who has ever tossed a bunch of lettuce seed package remnants together and made an ad-hock mix, a uniform height and color balanced mix is not usually forthcoming. I have been bemused to see baby leaf lettuces growing vigorously in a little strip of a single variety, but when combined with other varieties act totally different. They either refuse to germinate, germinate a little slower than the other lettuces and are smothered, or shoot up and dominate the whole mix. Fresh seed is important, providing an equal footing in vigor. Amounts of each variety is important, so there is color balance. Price is important, I am being careful to not add anything too expensive unless it is so very unique, and I am looking for cheaper substitutes. And I think that texture is important, having grown, cut and sold the Osborne Mixes and other seed company's mixes before working at Osborne. Nice fluffy mixes, that is what I like. Hope you like them too!



New All Red Lettuce mix



New Slow and Frilly Mix