Vegetables - Lettuce
Lettuce is hardy and can be sown March-April. My garden dries out in the summer, which lettuce doesn't like, so early sowing seems to help. The seed is fairly small, thin and long. Sow it in place, in a row. I don't transplant them, so they need to be sown thinly. I do several sowings of lettuce, as germination can be poor, sometimes. This depends on the wetness and warmth of the soil, including the weather after you've sown them! So unless you're a weather prophet, it's best to do several sowings, and hopefully one or more will be the right conditions.
There are plenty of varieties of lettuce. The leaves may be green or red. They may be smooth edged or raggedy. They may be open or in a ball. I grow one green and one red variety a year. The red lettuce is raggedy, and the green is smooth edged. I've use Lollo Rosso (red) and Little Gem (green), but Red Oakleaf also grew well.
Lettuces can be eaten as soon as they appear! But obviously you need to leave them to grow a decent size for a good crop. However, you can thin them by removing alternate seedlings to eat.
The main enemy of lettuce is slugs and snails. I don't do much about that about from encouraging birds in the garden. Thrushes eat snails! Hedgehogs eat slugs and snails as well. There is something else - I think that red lettuce seems to be eaten less, but that may be unscientific!
The other problems with lettuce that I've found is poor germination (sometimes) and bolting. Bolting means that the lettuce, rather than growing flat on the ground, starts to produce a stem, which can eventually turn into a flower. The leaves get bitter at this stage. You can cut the stem off, but usually the plant is on its way out by that time. It happens because of dry weather, so I try to grow lettuce as early as I can, and once they start bolting, shrug and accept that's the end of the lettuce crop this year.
You don't have to harvest a whole lettuce at once. It is possible to pull off leaves from a plant, if it's big enough, and it will carry on growing. If you do use the whole lettuce, then obviously you need to cut off the root. The lettuce may need washing as well, if it is dirty from the soil. It might be as well to check it over for slugs as well! Just remove them - the lettuce is OK to eat although you may want to trim off the eat marks!
2021 was such a terrible spring (April was cold and dry, May was cold and wet) that I couldn't manage to germinate lettuce from seed, so I bought some seedlings from a garden centre. They're growing well.
Click on photos for large version.
© Jo Edkins 2021 - Return to Garden index