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Let us learn the ease of growing our own lettuce
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Published: April 25, 2009
Spring salads are beginning to creep into people's minds. And at the foundation of a salad is lettuce -- crisp sweet and fresh, most of all fresh.
But the lettuce you can grow is nothing like the lettuce available at the grocery store. Homegrown lettuce is much better than those plastic-boxed organic mixes and doesn't even resemble the plastic-wrapped semigreen iceberg types that are more like water in leaf form than real lettuce.
Waverly Root in his encyclopedic book Food comments that iceberg has one ninth as much vitamin A as romaine, one third as much calcium as romaine and one fourth as much iron as butterhead.
Lettuce seed has been found in Egyptian tombs. Along with artichokes and cabbage, lettuce was among the three vegetables listed as favorites by the Romans in 500 B.C.
Lettuce was domesticated from a wild Eurasian plant, Lactuca sativa. There are also North American cousins to this plant such as Lactuca canadensis, called appropriately enough wild lettuce. You can find it in roadside ditches and sometimes even in the garden where it bears candelabras of tiny dandelion like pale yellow flowers.
Sprinkle the seed
Lettuce is an easy crop to grow, needing only fertile ground, cool soil and air, and continuous moisture. Seed can be sprinkled lightly on the soil surface and watered in to yield little ones in about 10 days to two weeks, or you can sow it in a pot of potting soil on a windowsill for much quicker results and then transplant it to the garden.
It is important to transplant the plants into individual small containers once they have three or four sets of leaves. They should not become crowded or root bound in the pot. Lettuce is a product of the cool seasons -- spring and fall. In hot weather, the plant will go to seed, what gardeners call bolting. It produces a milky liquid that gives it a bitter taste. Lettuce grown under stressful conditions -- such as too much heat, too crowded or with too little water -- is liable to give up growing and just throw a flower shoot.
There are several kinds of lettuce to grow. Butterheads form loose succulent heads of tender leaves. Romaine makes tall cylindrical heads. Loose-leafs are best harvested by collecting individual leaves, and then there are variety mixes intended to be broadcast in the garden and harvested as baby leaves when just a few inches tall. Each category has varieties that are both beautiful and delicious. The beauty and diversity of lettuce is so great that they warrant planting as ornamental as well as edible plants.
Below are a few varieties that will compare with any member of the spring flower garden for their decorative appeal. Planted in beds among poppies, iris and spring pansies, they make a beautiful display.
□ Rouge D'Hiver: A bronze tinted romaine type that hates the heat but performs beautifully in the cool season.
□ Lolla Rosa: This variety forms little balls of extraordinarily frilled leaves with deep red edges that fade to a bright chartreuse center. It is a nice, compact size for sticking in among the bedding plants or in containers.
□ Oak Leaf: A green variety that is also available in red, a low mounding plant that has scalloped edges like an oak leaf.
□ Yugoslavian Red: A butterhead type that appears as if the loosely open light-green heads have been frosted with red.
□ Outredgeous: One of the deepest red lettuces available, this romaine type matures at about 10 inches tall.
The time it will take a vegetable to become a harvestable size is known as days to maturity. Seed packets offer this number as a guideline for when to get started. With lettuce you want to get an early start to avoid the hot weather. Plan on harvesting lettuce before we get too far into June. Outredgeous is listed as 52 days to maturity, so you would want to start at least by early April and as early as late February indoors. You could also harvest it as a cut lettuce in the baby stage and reduce the harvest time by half.
Everybody eats lettuce in one way or another, and it takes so little room that it is worth the effort to pop a few plants in a shrub bed or a pot on the patio. There is nothing quite like a salad of your own invention.
□ Gardeners shouldn't miss the opportunity to see The Garden, a documentary about the country's largest community garden and the politics surrounding its survival. It will be shown Sunday at 9:30 a.m. at the RiverRun Film Festival at the UNC School of the Arts.
■ If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.
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