Luscious Lettuce

Continued from the previous page, but here's a quick synopsis. Lettuce is as easy to grow as grass, and can be much more flavorful than that purchased in the store. It's also healthier and kinder to the environment to grow it in your back yard. A few pinches of seed, sown often and in a healthy soil, can keep you in plenty of lettuce because each lettuce plant will give you up to two months of harvest.

The whole secret is to sow a small amount of lettuce seed often, perhaps three weeks apart. You're not a farmer who needs to bring in his crop all at once to send to market, instead you want to supply your family and yourself with a little bit of high-quality and varied lettuce each week.

Lettuce is most comfortable when it is cool and moist. During the cold part of the year locate the plants in a warm and bright area, and during the warm part of the year sow the seed in a shady spot. Experiment with different varieties both for taste and to determine what grows well in your location during those seasons.

It's mid-May, this bed of lettuce on the left is maybe good for one more harvest before the plants are composted. The lettuce was fed with fish emulsion after each cutting. At the store they want over $4 a pound for 'Spring Blend Leaf Lettuce' and it's several days old.

After this bed is rebuilt we'll plant squash here. The squash plants are about six inches tall and are currently in four-inch containers. We're growing a yellow crookneck and regular zucchini, also a regular green zucchini and a Pattypan.  Behind the photographer is a brand new lettuce bed which has already been harvested several times.

Here's a batch grown in a barrel. They're also at their last cutting, starting to get a little bitter. This is a blend of mostly red leaf lettuces and they're much too warm for their liking. During the cool late winter and spring this was an excellent home for lettuce, but in the early summer the soil in a barrel is difficult to keep moist and the plants suffer. This spot would be better for some marigolds.

That's garlic in the upper left corner, not corn.

There aren't any pictures of the summer lettuce yet, but they're grown the same way, except they could use a little cool shade. Lettuce doesn't 'bolt' (go to seed) because it's summer, it's because they're an annual and have a short growing season. Higher temperatures speed up their life cycle.

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