Lettuce is the cornerstone of every salad. When it comes to growing lettuce you’d think it would be straight forward, but there are tons of varieties of lettuce you can grow each with different flavors and uses. Despite the high variety count for lettuce, most of them share the same base characteristics when it comes to growing them in your garden.
Lettuce Details:
- Family: Asteraceae
- Growing Season: Spring through Fall depending on zone and variety
- Growing Zones: 3 through 10
- Spacing: 6-12 inches (15-30 cm) apart
- Seed to Harvest time: 45-75 days
- Indoor Starting: Not recommended
- Earliest Planting: After danger of frost
- Watering: Water thoroughly once a week. Do not water frequently unless the soil becomes completely dry or you may harm root development.
- Sunlight Requirements: Full sun to partial shade, plants need more shade in summer to prevent early bolting.
- Planting: plant seed 1/4 inch deep.
- Weeding: Lettuce is fairly weed tolerant, but should be weeded at least weekly to keep plants healthy.
- Harvesting: Harvest as needed for leaf lettuce picking a few leaves at a time. Head lettuce can be harvested as a whole head by cutting just above the plant base.
- Known Pests: Lettuce is relatively pest free, but has shallow roots that are easily disturbed. Prevent critters from digging in the garden with barriers to ensure your plants stay healthy.
More about Lettuce:
Lettuce is a really interesting plant when it comes to how you can raise it. Growing lettuce in the ground is the most common method, but it also takes well to raised beds, hydroponics, tower growing systems, and even potting. Due to it’s shallow root system lettuce can grow just about anywhere given enough nutrients for it to grow.
Hydroponic lettuce is particularly fascinating as over watering garden lettuce will kill it outright, but if you keep it’s roots suspended in water the plant grows just fine.
Beyond it’s interesting adaptability for cultivation, lettuce is something that can be grown year round if you really try. While growing lettuce indoors over winter certainly isn’t worth it from a time and money perspective, the fact that it can be done at all is amazing.
As a final gardening note about lettuce, be sure to read up on and pick varieties that you like to eat rather than just what is easiest to grow. We’ve grown a lot of bland and boring lettuce when we could have grown much more flavorful varieties all along.
Lettuce Tasting and Food Notes
Lettuce is a mild semi-bitter green. It’s got a lot of varieties with a lot of “different” flavors, but the uses for lettuce are the same. Lettuce is primarily used as the base for salads, but it can also be used to top dishes or as a bed for more exciting food. If you’re cutting carbs, lettuce wraps are a common bread substitute for hand held foods.
When it comes to choosing a variety of lettuce to use, there is a lot of personal preference at play. While some people like leafy deep green lettuces, others prefer a paler watery crunch of other varieties. Just be sure you use lettuce you like in your garden, and don’t just pick what’s easiest to grow.
Should I Grow Lettuce In My Garden?
If not lettuce, you should grow some type of leafy green vegetable. Lettuce isn’t for everyone as it has a unimpressive mild taste, but it’s mildness can lead to creating salads where other elements of your garden get to be stars of the show. We personally think lettuce is an easy pick for any garden, but it primarily relies on what you want to grow. Overall, it’s easy to grow and almost always yields a fair amount for use no matter what variety you want to grow, so we’d say dive it a try!