Growing Lettuce

Growing lettuce is one of the easiest ways to get into vegetable gardening. Gnomes love lettuce because you can eat it almost from the time that it begins to sprout.

Enjoy bountiful salads all spring, then again in the fall. Plant some in the shade, and you’ll have summer lettuce as well. Learn how to grow lettuce and in some areas you can eat it from your garden the whole year around. There are two different types of lettuce plants: head lettuce and leaf lettuce. Head lettuces include iceberg, which has very few nutrients.

Butter lettuces like Bibb lettuce and Boston lettuce have more nutrients. Some of the most nutritious and delicious lettuce varieties are leaf lettuces. Romaine leaf lettuce forms loose heads. All are nutritious, full of fiber and vitamins. Generally, the darker the leaves, the more nutritious they are.

You’ll Find A Wide Variety Of Seed At:

Henry Fields Seed and Nursery

When To Plant Lettuce

Residents in the Southern United States can grow lettuce outdoors during the entire winter. The same is true for those who live in the coastal regions and the interior valleys of the West coast states and provinces of North America.

If a frost is predicted, they can cover the rows with plastic or sheets, or grow them under remay. In the Northern United States, lettuce can be planted outdoors from mid-February to early June. The seed germinates best at temperatures of 40-80 degrees. It grows best at 60-65 degrees.

Crops for over wintering can be planted in the late fall, to germinate and establish roots before the cold. Lettuce will keep growing at very low temperatures, but will do better if it establishes roots before temperatures drop to near freezing.

How to Grow Lettuce from Seed

Even if you have good garden soil, you will still have better germination rates if you dig a small trench about two inches deep, and fill it with light seed mix in which to start the seeds. Just barely cover the lettuce seeds with about ¼ inch of the lightweight soil or vermiculite (so that it won’t crust).

Then, keep the seeds lightly moist until they germinate. You can just use a rosette or misting nozzle on the end of a watering wand and pass the hose over the seeds a couple of times - about the length of a gnome shower. (We don’t like water all that much.) You do not want to make the soil so wet that it begins to run, because the seeds are light and could float away.

What To Feed Growing Lettuce

Harvesting Lettuce

Head lettuce should be grown until the head is well formed and firm. You can cut it off at the soil in the early morning to preserve high carotene levels.

Leaf lettuce can be harvested when there are at least five or six leaves on each plant. To keep plants producing continuously, pick only the outer leaves from each plant, at the base where the leaf meets the plant. New leaves will continue to grow from the center of each plant. Keep harvesting as long as the plant keeps producing.

As growing lettuce plants get older, you can taste the flavor becoming bitterer and less fresh. Once a seed stalk starts growing, the lettuce plant is done producing. You can harvest baby lettuces by snipping of the leaves with scissors.

You can harvest “cut and come again” greens by cutting the plants back to just above the soil, leaving the growing bud intact, to re-sprout. That is an easier method to harvest an entire salad’s worth of greens at once. If you’re like me, and you love lettuce, you will need several rows of cut and come again plants to keep your table full of fresh salads.

For the easiest and endless lettuce yet, read the Baby Lettuce In Containers article.

Even if you have never gardened before, you will soon find that growing lettuce is fun and rewarding. Just make sure to plant enough for your friendly garden gnome. Happy gardening,

Geefrank

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