How to grow mâches

Mache, also called corn salad, is a low, spoon-leaved rosette grown almost entirely for its cold hardiness. It survives winters that shut down every other salad green, coming through hard freezes under nothing more than mulch or row cover, and fills the gap between the last fall lettuce and the first spring one. The leaves are small, soft, and mildly nutty, harvested by cutting whole rosettes at the base or picking individual leaves and leaving the crown to keep producing. Because it stays low and slow-growing all winter, it tucks neatly into bed edges and cold frames where lettuce or spinach would sprawl or bolt.

The hardest part of growing mache well is sowing it at the wrong end of the season. Utah State University Extension and the UC Master Gardener Program both note the seed goes dormant in warm soil and bolts once heat arrives, so it must go in as summer ends, not in spring with the salad bed. A second-year gardener working from one spring calendar often sows it with the lettuce, then blames the seed when little comes up. The real problem is timing: the same seed sown in late summer, as the ground cools, germinates readily and carries the garden through winter, the season mache suits.