A cut-and-come-again salad bed

The usual salad problem is that everything is ready in the same fortnight. This bed is arranged around cutting rather than harvesting: take the outer leaves of each lettuce and leave the crown, and one square keeps giving for weeks instead of ending in one meal.

The chive squares are perennial. Once established they come back every year without being replanted, which makes them the highest-return two squares in the bed.

The layout

North is the top row. Each square is one foot.

A cut-and-come-again salad bed: a 4 foot by 4 foot bed, north row first, one plant per square foot.
Lettuce (north-west corner)	Lettuce	Lettuce	Lettuce
Lettuce	Lettuce	Chives	Chives
Radish	Radish	Carrot	Carrot
Carrot	Carrot	Carrot	Carrot

Open this plan in the Garden Designer →

It opens with the bed already laid out. Free, no account, nothing to install. Change anything you like: the designer will flag bad neighbours as you move plants and work out sowing dates for your own zone.

What's in it

Lettuce4 per square foot · 45 days to harvest · zones 2–10
Chives9 per square foot · 60 days to harvest · zones 3–10
Radish16 per square foot · 25 days to harvest · zones 2–10
Carrot16 per square foot · 70 days to harvest · zones 2–10

Why these sit next to each other

Lettuce and Carrot: Shallow lettuce roots don't compete with deep carrot roots.
Lettuce and Radish: Radish matures fast and breaks up soil for lettuce.
Chives and Carrot: Same allium/carrot pest-masking effect measured for onion and carrot (Uvah & Coaker 1984) — a real, peer-reviewed field study, not folklore.

Companion planting is a mix of well-evidenced effects and garden tradition. We say which is which on each plant profile rather than presenting all of it as settled.

How to work this bed

Cut lettuce leaves from the outside in, about an inch above the crown. Pull the whole plant only when it starts to bolt.
Carrots and radishes share the southern half because both are short. Radishes come out first and mark the row while the carrots are still germinating, which takes two to three weeks.
Thin the carrots properly. It feels wasteful and it's the single biggest difference between a carrot square that works and one that produces tangled fingers.

Timing it for where you live

Nothing above says when, because that depends entirely on your hardiness zone. Open the plan in the designer and it produces a week-by-week schedule for your own zone, or look the crops up individually on the planting calendar.

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A 4x4 bed that keeps producing salad instead of giving you everything at once: leaves you cut rather than pull, plus roots and chives.

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