For many of us, fall is football season. But for gardeners, fall initiates a three-season play on growing and harvesting lettuces, the cool season annual thriving best in temperatures of 45°F to 75°F in fall, winter, and spring in USDA hardiness zones 6 and above. So while football fans are cheering their teams to bowl eligibility and beyond, gardeners are drafting their own performers for the lettuce bowl.
Lettuce Line-up
In football, a team is only as strong as its individual members, all of whom have unique attributes that, combined, make a winning season. Just as there are different types of football players, lettuces, Lactuca sativa, are classified in several ways – by growth habit, by season, and by the manner of growing.
If you want salad players that will deliver certain kinds of key offensive plays, you might want to pick your lettuces based on growth habit. Lettuces classified by growth habit are:
- Bibb or Butterheads – form soft, buttery, loose heads, e.g., ‘Buttercrunch’
- Cos or Romaine – form crisp upright elongated leaves and thick midribs, e.g., ‘LittleGem’
- Crisphead – form dense tight oval heads, e.g., ‘Iceberg’
- Loose-leaf – grow tender leaves in rosettes with no dense head, e.g. ‘Red Sails’
- Stem – form enlarged celerylike stems, e.g., ‘Celtuce’
On the other hand, the time of year that your lettuce bowl occurs means you want lettuces that will be ready for opening day of the season. Lettuces classified by growing season are:
- Fall lettuce – ‘Rouge d’Hiver’ and 'Deer Tongue'
- Winter lettuce – ‘Winter Density’ and 'Salad de Russe'
- Spring lettuce – ‘Black-seeded Simpson’ and 'Tom Thumb'
- Summer lettuce – ‘Slobolt’ and 'Jericho'
Keeping your team healthy is key, so make sure you pick lettuces that can be pushed to their limits but remain injury-free during the season. Lettuces classified by manner of growing are:
- Forcing lettuces – butterheads bred for growing in greenhouses, cold frames or tunnels, e.g., ‘Magnet’
- Cutting lettuces – vigorous loose-leaf lettuces that are sown thickly and grown for cutting as small tender cut-and-come-again, e.g., ‘Red Salad Bowl’
The Lettuce Playing Field
Just as the players are important for the game, so is the arena and turf they play on, and you want the best home field for your team. Lettuce grows in full sun or partial sun. Soil should be humus rich and high in nitrogen for best leaf production. Working in well-rotted manure or compost provides a friable, aerated, and moisture-retentive soil. Lettuce prefers a soil pH between 6.0 and 7.0.
If sowing lettuce outdoors in containers or small areas in situ, broadcast seed atop the soil and cover with a one-fourth inch layer of soil. Water thoroughly.
If starting lettuce indoors in flats, sow seed two months before the last frost date in a cool, moist environment.
Lettuce grows relatively fast and you can expect to harvest soon after planting. Summer lettuce will appreciate the shade when underplanted with corn, tomatoes, and pole beans and when interplanted between slower growing crops too.
Traditionalists grow lettuce in rows but it can also be sown in raised bed squares, containers on a patio or deck, and interplanted among flowerbeds. In winter, a cold frame is perfect for lettuce.
Lettuce roots are shallow and need constant water and nutrients. Drip irrigation gets water to the roots rather than on the leaves.
As plants mature, add organic amendments like bloodmeal, cottonseed meal or fish emulsion to enhance continued healthy growth.
Defensive Strategies with Lettuce
Coaching your team to a winning season requires knowledge of some key defensive strategies to use against opponents. Lettuce has few pests and diseases and since harvest is frequent, the gardener observes the crop often. Aphids, cabbage looper, corn earworm, cutworms, leafhoppers, and slugs are occasional pests. Ladybugs, hand picking of bugs, beer bait for slugs, and a good spray of water can nip problems in the bud.
Fungal diseases can cause leaf rot and mold. Drip irrigation, mulching, rotating crops and removing debris are practices to reduce the risk of fungus.
Mildew and mosaic virus resistant varieties of lettuce have been bred to reduce crop loss.
Recruiting Lettuce Varieties
Planning and recruiting for next season is a job that never ends. Coaches right now are working on their draft picks to build the most competitive team. Think like a coach – get out and scout for ways to find your best lettuce recruits. Gardeners, seed catalogs, seed banks, garden books and magazines, and the local extension service are the best resources when recruiting lettuce varieties for your garden.
The following seed catalogs have extensive selections of lettuce varieties:
- Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
- Burpee
- Fedco Seeds
- Heritage Harvest Seed
- Johnny’s Selected Seeds
- Park Seed
- Renee’s Garden
- Seed Savers Exchange
- Territorial Seed Company
- Thompson and Morgan
Lettuce Coaches
Although lettuce is one of the easiest vegetables to grow, veterans and rookies alike can learn from the experiences of respected lettuce coaches.
Eliot Coleman gardens year round in Maine where the main three-seasons for lettuce are spring, summer and fall in zone 5 and lower. Coleman has managed to add a winter growing season by sowing cold hardy lettuce varieties like ‘Brune d’Hiver’ in succession under the protection of cold frames, cold houses or tunnels.
He uses premium compost for tender leafy lettuce. He prefers to plant lettuce in 30 foot rows spaced 6 to10 inches apart and harvests lettuce when leaves are young by cutting 4 inch leaves with a knife or scissors one inch above the soil. This cut-and-come-again method produces multiple harvests.
Succession planting is an alternative method where a new batch of seed is sown every 7 to 10 days or every 2 to 4 weeks.
Mel Bartholomew uses square foot gardening to create a 4-foot-by-4-foot square all-lettuce garden. Each square foot accommodates four of the same variety of lettuce. The entire 16 squares could easily have 16 varieties of lettuce. Bartholomew considers an all-lettuce garden as beautiful as a flower garden with a vast variety of color, textures, shapes, and growing habits.
Within the square foot garden layout, one could improvise and create a living lettuce collage or quilt with many colorful and textural nuances provided by the vegetable.
For children, square foot gardens can become a whimsical ‘tic-tac-toe’ game board arrangement of lettuces or a bed of soporific lettuces for the Flopsy bunnies in The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter.
Edible landscaper Rosalind Creasy underplants lettuce beneath deciduous trees in winter and interplants lettuce with seasonal annual flowers within arm’s reach of the kitchen. She harvests dew-covered lettuce in the cool temperatures of early morning when leaves are crisp and flavorful. After washing leaves and drying in a salad spinner, she refrigerates them in a plastic bag for use later the same day.
British garden writer and organic gardener Joy Larkcom believes authors must experience growing plants first hand before writing to others about them. Larkcom traveled across Europe for a year discovering new varieties of lettuce and new ideas on how to grow them. She brought seeds back to her garden in England where she tested the concept of cut-and-come-again before introducing the concept to readers on how to cut time, space, and effort in the garden.
As you think about your own lettuce bowl, remember - Football lasts only one season but gardening is an experimental scrimmage to find the best varieties of lettuce that will help you go all the way to the lettuce bowl each season of the year.
Sources
- Bartholomew, Mel. Square Foot Gardening. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1981.
- Coleman, Eliot. Four-Season Harvest. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1992.
- Creasy, Rosalind. Cooking from the Garden. SanFrancisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988.
- Larkcom, Joy. The Salad Garden. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.
- Pleasant, Barbara. “All About Growing Lettuce,” Mother Earth News, April/May 2008.
- Smith, Powell, et.al. “Lettuce HGIC #1312,” Clemson: Clemson Cooperative Extension online, April 2003.
Arlene Marturano - Arlene Marturano, an educator, consultant, master gardener, and writer advocates gardens as a context and gardening as a tool for ...
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