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Friday Favorite: Homegrown Lettuce

May 10th, 2019

The longer I garden, the better I get at succession planting. It can be difficult to keep on the correct schedule and to figure out what schedule works for your garden, soil, and climate. For example, I have found that seeding every two weeks it too often for me. The lettuce seems to all come ready at once. When I seed every four weeks, I can have beautiful butterheads for salad all summer long. If there’s a bit of a lull between the lettuce forming heads, I simply harvest the outer leaves.





For me, growing lettuce is one of the greatest joys of edible gardening. There’s nothing quite as beautiful as a row of perfectly formed butterheads, they look like giant roses. If I had to choose one thing to grow in my edible space, it would definitely be lettuce.

Do you grow lettuce? Do you have a favorite variety/type to grow?

The Chicory Patch

June 19th, 2018

Chicories are notoriously difficult to grow, they can be overly bitter if the weather is too warm, or really tough if not blanched. They are picky about the amount of water that hits their leaves and will turn into a slimy mass if it’s too wet. Even though I’ve had my share of failures, that doesn’t stop me from growing a variety of endive, escarole, and radicchio each year.

My various spring started chicories are looking particularly great this year. I’ll be starting to harvest them this week. This year I’m attempting to blanch the endives under terra-cotta pots. This should help keep them drier to avoid any browning and sliming.

Even though we don’t always get fresh chicories from the garden, I always grow them in part because they are beautiful plants. Some years they are inedibly bitter for the humans, but the chickens always find them delicious. I find that the newer hybrid varieties do much better in the garden, they’re often bred to withstand less than perfect conditions with a bit more grace. I’ve had much better success since transitioning to varieties from Johnny’s Seeds.

What are some of your most loved difficult to grow vegetables?

The Best Lettuce

June 15th, 2017

This year I’ve managed to grow the best looking lettuce I’ve ever grown. Every time I look at it in the garden I’m happy as can be. Perhaps its the varieties I chose, most of them came from Johnny’s Seeds and are selected for specific traits. The butterhead lettuces are amazing, the Salanovas are sizing up slowly, which is nice because they will hold in the garden while I harvest the other types. Here are the lovely mature lettuces in my garden. Butterheads are my favorite types to eat and to grow. I find them to be stunning both in the garden and in a salad. If I had to choose one variety to grow it would definitely be butterheads. Luckily I don’t have to choose, so I grow all different kinds.








They’re so pretty I almost don’t want to harvest them, luckily I love salad more than I love the look in the garden. My second planting of lettuce will be mature as this batch is eaten up. I should have seeded another flat a week or two ago, but I was traveling and then sick so I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Luckily in the summer there is a bounty of veg from the garden and lettuce takes a back seat to all the heat loving crops.

What’s your favorite type of lettuce?

My Favorite Season

May 9th, 2017

Salads are one of my favorite meals, I can eat them every single day and never tire of them. I love that you can top lettuce with a wide variety of protein, fruit, and vegetables to have a different meal every day. In the spring, I plant enough seedlings so that I can harvest a leaf or two from each plant and have enough for at least a side salad for each of us at dinner.

That makes for a lot of lettuce plants, but they grow when nothing else needs garden space. As soon as the plants are growing more quickly and producing more leaves, some of the lettuce plants are removed to make way for other crops.

What’s your favorite vegetable to grow yourself?

Salanova® Red Butter Lettuce

May 3rd, 2017

I order a lot of seeds from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, they’re located right up the road from me. Supporting local businesses is important, as well as supporting businesses like Johnny’s that are employee owned. Johnny’s is a farm supply place, so their offerings are sometimes different than what most consumer market seed houses provide. One of the products I’ve been noticing in their catalogs the last few years is Salanova® lettuce. It’s designer lettuce seed to be sure and comes with the price to prove it. This year I finally took the plunge and ordered one pack of seed. One packet of seeds costs $5.45, it contains a minimum of 25 seeds. Yes you read that correctly, 25 seeds. Of course they overpack, so I ended up with roughly 40 pelleted seeds in my pack.



So far I’ve planted 12 of the seeds and had 100% germinate rate. The pelleted seeds are nice because it’s super easy to plant one seed per soil block. The result is that there is zero thinning. The plants are super uniform in size, which makes complete sense since they’re geared towards commercial production. I noticed that each plant grows at the same rate and is very consistent in shape and size.

Overall, I’m a fan of this type of lettuce. I’ll keep you posted on how well it continues to grow, what it looks like at harvest, and most importantly….how it tastes!

About

This is a daily journal of my efforts to cultivate a more simple life, through local eating, gardening and so many other things. We used to live in a small suburban neighborhood Ohio but moved to 153 acres in Liberty, Maine in 2012.

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