Year Round Salad Mix Production

Coonamessett Farm operates a typical small scale farm that grows vegetables, small fruit, cutting flowers, herbs, bedding plants, etc. The products are sold at farmer's markets and directly to restaurants. One product offered is a salad mix made up of young as well as mature leaves of many varieties of lettuce and greens. This is a very profitable item during the good growing seasons of spring and fall. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts funded Coonamessett Farm to demonstrate growing salad mix cost-effectively on a year-round basis. The main objective of this project was to compare conventional growing methods used for salad mix, greenhouse and field, to a new approach using a high tunnel with root zone heating in winter and liquid shade in summer. Gross and net income of the various production methods were compared on a seasonal basis.