Planting Guide – Starting Lettuce from Seed

Lettuce is one of my favorite kitchen garden crops.  It tastes so much better than the grocery store lettuce, will grow even with ritual abuse, and produces pretty darn good yields.

Because it can tolerate the cool weather, it’s one of the first crops that I start indoors the early winter.  If you have a hoop house, or some rudimentary way to cover it, it can be transplanted outside in late early March pretty easily.  If you don’t, you can just grow it right on a window sill indoors–like your own private indoor garden.

I like to grow a variety–you know, to keep things fresh.  This year, I plan on starting:

• Romaine lettuce
• Buttercrunch lettuce
• Mesclun lettuce
• Gourmet baby greens
• Oak leaf lettuce

Each variety has its own flavor–some more bitter, some slightly sweet, crunchy, etc., which means I can have harvest the leaves based on whatever blows my hair back on any given day.  Some, like Oak leaf lettuce, has really pretty leafy greens, so it can be integrated right into potted flowers as edible ornamentals.

How to Grow Lettuce from Seed:

Lettuce from seed is the perfect way to “cut your teeth” on gardening with seed, rather than plant starts.  Put the seeds in dirt, and you can pretty much guarantee they will grow.   To directly sow them {start them outside in the actual garden}, plant them 2-4 weeks BEFORE the average last frost.  You can continue to sow seeds every 3-4 weeks for a continual spring/early summer harvest.

Sow the seeds about 1/8″ deep.  Seed spacing varies a bit depending on variety, so reference the seed packet for that. Sprinkle the seeds lightly with water {too much water will cause the seeds to wash away or drift out of their little OCD rows}.  Thin your seedlings when they are about 1/2″ tall.

To start lettuce indoors, you use the same general principle listed above.  Just start with seed starter mix as your grow medium.  You can also use peat pots–really whatever seed starting medium you have on hand.  Place the grow medium in  your containers {commercially purchased flats, old yogurt containers with drainage holes poked in the bottom, etc.}, water them well.  Watering them before placing your seeds helps to keep your seeds in place.  Then, poke the seeds into each container {I usually plant 2-3 seeds per container and thin them out later} to about 1/8″ deep.  Put them under a grow light, or in a well-lit window sill and let them do their thing.  Keep the soil evenly moist, but not soggy.

When is Lettuce Ready to Harvest?

Leaf lettuce can be harvested as needed pretty much whenever the leaves reach at least 1″ or longer.  Harvest them by snapping them off from the outside of the plant and working your way toward the middle.  Leaf lettuce will continue to produce a crop until it goes to seed.  Head lettuce can be harvested as needed, as well, but it doesn’t really like it.

Ideally, you want to harvest the entire head when it has fully matured by cutting it 2″-3″ from the base of the plant. Leaving the base will encourage a second crop of leaves, though, not likely an entire new head of lettuce.

Random Facts That Will Impress No One:

The nutritional value of lettuce varies significantly based on variety–in general, though, the darker the leaf, the better it is for you.  Plus, lettuce is one of the very few veggies that cannot be “put up” in any way.  It is a fresh only sort of food–it can’t be successfully frozen, canned, dehydrated or pickled.

Iceberg lettuce {the least nutritious the lettuce clan} was originally called Crisphead lettuce.  Its name was change dinn the 1920’s when farmers started shipping it covered in ice.

On average, Americans eat about 30 pounds of lettuce each year.

So, “let us” ponder those random little bits of information and then get to planting…

~Mavis

P.S. For salad ideas that will rock your world, check out Super Salads:  More Than 250 Super-Easy Recipes for Super Nutrition and Super Flavor.  It’s one of my favorites!