Lettuce is one of the easiest and most rewarding foods that you can grow for yourself. It’s a cool-season crop, so it’s ready to eat before anything else in your garden, and it tastes so much better than the stuff from the store you will wonder how you ever ate that Iceberg stuff.
There are many different varieties of lettuce you can grow in your garden, but they mainly fall into the categories of crisphead, butterhead, loose-leaf and cos or romaine.
Crisphead is the type of lettuce most people are familiar with; Iceberg is the most well-known variety. These types of lettuces make firm heads (they are also known as cabbage lettuces because they grow like cabbages). These types of lettuce are very crunchy and have a mild flavor. Many varieties of crisphead lettuce are slow to bolt and thus are good to grow in the summer. (Bolting is what happens when it gets too hot for the lettuce plants, they grow tall and bitter and go to seed.) These varieties can be hard to grow and offer little in the way of flavor or nutrition.
Butterhead varieties include Boston and Bibb. These are sometimes known as European lettuces because the varieties are quite popular there. These lettuces tend to make smaller heads and have darker green leaves than the crispheads, and they are often harvested before the head really closes up. They are often tender, rarely bitter and grow quickly.
There are numerous varieties of loose-leaf lettuce; these are the kinds you will find in the bagged spring lettuce mixes in your grocery store. They aren’t often sold unbagged in supermarkets, but you will likely be able to find some in bulk at your local natural foods store. Oak Leaf and Salad Bowl are some of the more famous names. These varieties are often sold together in a mix, much like their grown-up leaves. Loose-leaf lettuce is great because you can harvest just a small part of each plant at a time if you want, the rest will keep growing.
Cos, or romaine, is also well known from the grocery store. It is known as Cos because that is allegedly the Mediterranean island where the lettuce originated. It has large, tall leaves and is very tasty but can be hard to grow. It is the least forgiving of bad soil or high temperatures, so it’s not very practical for the beginning gardener. More experienced gardeners with more pampered plants say this is the best kind of lettuce, but the other varieties are great and need a lot less effort.
We should also mention spinach in this discussion, because it is a great addition to a mixed-greens salad and easy to grow right alongside your spring lettuce (there are new varieties of spinach that will grow longer into the summer, but the most mild and tender ones are best grown in the spring). Spinach grows much like loose-leaf lettuce; you can harvest a little and come back for more later.
Greens are quite easy to grow and don’t need a lot of space. If you don’t have a backyard garden you can grow greens in a window box or other container. Lettuces tend to have shallow roots, so they don’t need a great amount of depth to thrive. The main requirement for growing lettuce and spinach is water (greens will grow dramatically overnight after a rain). It is possible to overwater, so consistent light waterings are really the best.
You may be able to find seedlings of crisphead and butterhead varieties in the early spring, but for loose-leaf and romaine you will probably only be bale to find seeds. This means that you will have a much greater variety of lettuce and spinach types to choose from, especially when you consider mail order and Internet sources.
If you can afford organic or heirloom seed, it really is worth the extra money for varieties that have more flavor and history and that come to you without damaging the earth in any way.
Lettuce seeds are usually quite small, shaped like sunflower seeds but much smaller. They are usually black, brown or white. They should be planted a quarter to a half inch deep (or deeper if you are planting in the late summer when it is still getting very hot during the day). Lettuce can be planted spring and fall; you know it’s time in the spring when the ground is not frozen and it is dry. I usually plant when the nights start to stay above freezing, but I could probably plant even earlier than that.
Scatter the seeds in row about a foot apart (they’re really too small to place individually). Most seeds will germinate and break through the surface in seven to ten days. After a couple of weeks you will want to thin the seedlings to about four inches apart for leaf lettuce and spinach and up to a foot apart for varieties that make heads. Yes, they will grow if you don’t thin them, but you will get less food off of each plant if you leave them all to fight.
Succession planting is a good idea with lettuce, so you will be able to eat good lettuce from your garden longer. Sew more seeds every 10 to 14 days so that there will always be seedlings as well as plants you can eat.
Lettuce is not really a plant that has a specific growing time. While the seed packages will say 50 to 70 days to harvest, lettuce is ready when it looks big enough to eat (spinach is the same) unless you are waiting for a head to form. What’s big enough is up to you, but don’t let leaves get too big, especially in the summer, because the older leaves tend to be more bitter.
If you want to extend your harvest further, try planting lettuce in your garden in the shade of other plants, such as pepper or tomato plants. The shade can make it a few degrees cooler for these plants, which may e enough to extend your harvest by a few weeks.
Homegrown lettuce is great in simple salads with no more adornment than some cheese and homemade salad dressing. Of course you can use it for fancier salads, too, but at least for your first homegrown salad, make it simple so you can enjoy the flavors of the different kinds of lettuce and spinach, especially if you didn’t know lettuce had flavor.
