Growing Salad Burnet: A Complete Profile
By Growing Home Greens Team · August 10, 2026
Salad burnet tastes surprisingly like cucumber for a plant that isn’t remotely related to one, a mild, refreshing flavor that made it a fixture in old kitchen gardens before lettuce and spinach became the default salad greens. It’s also cold-hardy, staying green through frost that would flatten most greens.
Sowing it
Direct-sow in spring once the soil is workable, or start indoors 6 to 8 weeks before your outdoor planting date. Seed needs light to germinate, so barely cover it. Germination takes 5 to 10 days. Space plants 8 to 12 inches apart in rows about 18 inches apart; a mature plant reaches 16 to 24 inches tall.
It’s hardy in zones 4-8 and behaves as a genuine perennial, coming back on its own each spring rather than needing to be resown.
Leaves are best before and after bloom
Individual leaves can be harvested once the plant is established, and stay most tender before and after it flowers. Once flowering is in full swing, leaves toughen up, so timing a harvest around that window matters more with salad burnet than with a fast annual green.
A groundcover that earns its keep
Because it’s perennial and stays low, salad burnet works well as an edible groundcover along a bed edge rather than a crop you replant every season. Its cold tolerance also makes it one of the few fresh greens still worth cutting after a hard frost has taken out everything else.
Salad burnet has no well-established companion pairings, and nothing it needs to be kept away from. Its perennial habit means it wants a permanent spot in the Garden Designer rather than a slot in the annual rotation.
Source: Salad Burnet: Key Growing Information, Johnny’s Selected Seeds.
Companion planting guide for Salad Burnet · Find your planting dates
Typically viable in USDA zones 4-8. Not sure your zone? Look it up by ZIP code.
Mature height: 1.5-2 ft
Method: Either: Start indoors for an earlier harvest, or direct-sow outside for less fuss. Either works.
When to plant salad burnet, by zone
Every zone salad burnet grows in. Pick your zone in the header and it will be highlighted here. Each zone links to its full page.
| Zone | Start indoors | Sow or plant out | Harvest |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4a & 4b | Mar 27–Apr 3 | May 22–May 29 | Aug 5–Aug 12 |
| 5a & 5b | Mar 22–Mar 29 | May 17–May 24 | Jul 31–Aug 7 |
| 6a & 6b | Mar 7–Mar 14 | May 2–May 9 | Jul 16–Jul 23 |
| 7a & 7b | Feb 20–Feb 27 | Apr 17–Apr 24 | Jul 1–Jul 8 |
| 8a & 8b | Feb 4–Feb 11 | Apr 1–Apr 8 | Jun 15–Jun 22 |
Harvest dates are about 75 days after the sow or plant-out date, not after starting seeds indoors.
See exact start-indoors, direct-sow, and harvest dates for your zone →
How many Salad Burnet plants fit per square foot?
Spacing: 1 per square foot (square-foot-gardening spacing). Mature height: 1.5-2 ft.
Varieties worth considering
- Straight-species salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor): Johnny's Selected Seeds sells it as the plain species; there's no real named-cultivar market. It's an old kitchen-garden green that never developed the breeding attention lettuce or spinach did, so the wild-type species is what every packet sells. (source)
Why each variety is listed comes from the source shown next to it. We haven't grown these ourselves yet, so treat this as a research-backed starting point, not a personal endorsement. The buy links are separate from those sources: they go to seed suppliers that sell that exact variety, and we may earn a commission on some of them.
Where to buy salad burnet seeds
True Leaf Market (each supplier's salad burnet seeds)
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See it growing
Search YouTube for "growing salad burnet" videos → (a live search, not a hand-picked video; results vary and aren't vetted by us)
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Growing Salad Burnet: A cold-hardy, cucumber-flavored salad green that keeps producing as a perennial groundcover long after most lettuce has bolted.
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