I did manage to keep some radishes long enough to put in a salad, but it's just because I had some spinach survive the winter! But right now I have lettuce, spinach, kale, chard, and if I wanted to get really creative, I've got a few beet greens :)

Aside from that, I get stuff from the store.

With a fallish planting of greens, I get tomatoes, carrots, and anything that survived the summer...

Leisa

I was thinking of growing a fall crop of lettuce so I can have a garden fresh salad and add some pickled beets. Never canned nor grown a fall crop before. I did get some lettuce planted in a shading spot along the back of the house to extend the growing season a bit. My second year for gardening. My thoughts last yr were "how come you get lettuce in the spring and tomatoes, etc. in the fall?"

I try to think outside the box with salad. I've never been a big fan of lettuce, and in my hot climate, we never have lettuce at the same time as tomatoes anyway.

When I was a kid I always ate my cooked vegetables, but didn't like salad much, since it was usually iceburg lettuce with some sliced carrots and tomatoes tossed on and bottled ranch salad dressing. Boring!

Now I get a lot more creative putting all kinds of different things in salad. Any kind of veggie that's good raw, plus nuts, seeds, and fruits. I now make most of my own dressings too and get creative with different vinegars or lemon or lime juice. And salad doesn't always have to have lettuce!

One of my favorite fall/winter salads is arugula, walnuts, sliced pears, blue cheese, and a honey/oil/white wine vinegar dressing I mix up on the spot.

One of my coworkers brought a really good broccoli salad to our Thanksgiving office potluck. It was mostly blanched broccoli florets with bacon bits and nuts and some kind of creamy dressing. Wish I had asked for the recipe. I need to find one like it.

In early spring when I've got lots of radishes, I found a recipe for a salad that's radishes, avocado, cilantro, red onion, and a lime juice/olive oil dressing.

Another good spring salad is spinach and strawberries with balsamic vinegarette. Walnuts are good in this, and I bet other berries would be good as well.

In the summer, marinated cucumber based salads are good instead of lettuce based salads. Good with cherry tomatoes, red onions, and herbs. Melons are also good in salad for a bit of sweet contrast.

And of course there's the classic tomato, basil, fresh mozarrela cheese, and balsamic vinegar salad.

Oh, and if you pickle things, you can add pickles all year round, like pickled beets or pickled okra or pickled sweet peppers. And you can use the pickle juice to make salad dressings.

My fork

drafted...lol...ha ha ha!
neohippie has great ideas!
At work (school) we put pears, mandarin oranges, eggs, spinach, olives, bacon, strawberries, blueberries, onions, poppyseed dressing, green onions, jicama, etc. in salads...duh, forgot about those. Look at recipes from allrecipes.com for some ideas until you figure out the growing timing.
Most recent salad at school was romaine, jicama, bacon, strawberries with a really fresh dressing made with olive oil, lime juice and honey. Kids new fave. My sis likes cottage cheese on hers with pickled beets.

If you're trying to source your salad entirely from your own garden year round, you'll definitely need to broaden your notion of what salad is. The lettuce-tomato-radish-cucumber-capsicum salad is just one of an infinite number of possibilities, and as you've found, those ingredients actually aren't in season or at least not all at their best, at the same time in many climates.

But really, a salad is just veggies eaten raw (or blanched but still crispy) with some dressing. It might be based around lettuce or baby greens like kale, spinach, arugula, pak choy, mustard, miners lettuce,turnip greens, endive, raddichio etc etc etc. There are abundant possibilities, many of which are good even in the heat of summer.

Add some lightly toasted nuts or croutons or crispy bacon to a salad of mixed leaves and top with the dressing of your choice. I like honey-mustard.

Some other crops we eat as salads are fennel, thinly sliced, tossed with a handful of greens or parsley, olives and wedges of orange or grapefruit. Fennel is in season in spring and autumn here. Summer is too hot.

Celeriac also makes a nice winter salad grated, maybe with some carrot mixed in, or some sweet young turnip freshly picked from the garden.

A nice spring salad that doesn't need to wait for the tomatoes to be ready is lettuce with inner stalks of fresh celery (it's soooo sweet in spring), baby carrots, green onions and hard boiled egg, with a creamy dressing like mayonnaise or blue cheese or russian.

For an asian style salad, try cabbage or tatsoi, rice noodles, thinly slice carrot and green onion or shallot, herbs (mint & citantro maybe) and a dressing of garlic, chilli, lime juice, fish sauce, and sugar.

Google for salad recipes and you'll see heap of other options.

Yes, in my zone you cannot have lettuce with tomes and cukes.
But I make a good tasty salad with cucumbers, juicy tomes, sweet(or hot) green/red peppers, red onions,.

Dice them all up, add some basils and tarragon/mint,lenone juice, salt, and olive oil.
You may use vinegar instead of lemon juice, or both.
You will also need a spoon to eat it, like salsa.
This is a very colorful apetizing cool and refreshing salad.
It wont be long to try this.

You can use the flowers from your zucchini in a salad.

The best thing to add to a salad is a good home made salad dressing. It beats the pants off of any store bought dressing.

With greens, I like walnuts and blueberries. Either blueberries are in season, or I've got them in the freezer. If they are frozen, I just toss them in the salad frozen.

If I am buying stuff to go in salad, I like the artichoke hearts, pickled pepperocini peppers, and the fire roasted red peppers from Costco.

I also have frozen fire roasted red bell peppers and poblanos in my freezer. Those can be cut into strips and added to a salad.

I always toss a teaspoon of crush flax seed into the salad.

I make 3 bean salad and drop a spoonful into a green salad (or the 3 bean salad in the jar from Costco is good).

Aside from the usual lettuce, arugula, tomato, spinach, etc., we have become big fans of purslane in salads...yes, that "weed" that is so delicious and good for you.

There are lots of great ideas here.

I too am a "get it from my garden" fan. Right now, a salad from my garden would be:

- 4 different lettuces (coming in higgeldy piggeldy)
- a few spinach leaves (pitiful showing this year)
- herbs (sweet basil, lemon basil, dill, thai coriander, cilantro, mint, lemon thyme, parsley, lemon balm)
- any number of young onions
- the odd sweet pea pod I find
- young chard leaves
- young beet leaves

So, I sort of grab what's growing. Last year I had lots of young radish leaf salads.

The heat of summer will mean no lettuce, but I will have loads of cukes, peppers, and tomatoes. They seem to be the foundation of most of my peak summer salads.

Lettuce and cilantro is only thing harvestable in my garden. Sometimes
I put chopped walnut, grapes, apples, chicken, hard boiled eggs, with ranch
dressing... I also planted Sugar Snap Peas. I'm just now getting some peas
to eat. I live in Virginia Beach.

Jollyrd,
It might also be worth checking out this great thread on hot weather salad greens that's been running for years on the Market Garden Forum...Some fantastic ideas there.

Here is a link that might be useful: hot weather greens thread

I'm going to try a new type of cabbage this summer that is supposed to be fast growing and very heat tolerant - Chinese Cabbage Letucy Type. The description says it is a romaine lettuce-like, frilly cabbage so I'm hoping it will be good for salads in July/Aug. This will be my 1st time growing it, so I don't know yet how good it will be...

Here is a link that might be useful: lettucy type seeds

And besides all the suggestions above...you can plant radishes like every 2 weeks for a more steady supply until your temps get so hot that they bolt. Then again in the fall as it starts cooling down, you can plant every 2 weeks.