Lettuce
Lactuca sativa
If you want to reduce your supermarket bill and also improve the quality of your salads, grow lettuce -- and grow it in variety. With very little space, growing lettuce gives you a steady supply of wonderful salads from earliest spring until past frost. Try growing lettuce in containers. You'll have only a short hiatus in the hottest parts of summer, when this cool-season vegetable stops producing.
Lettuce comes in four basic types: crisphead, butterhead, loose-leaf, and romaine. Crisphead types are also called iceberg or Batavian lettuce. Butterhead lettuces form smaller, looser heads. Loose-leaf lettuce has an open growth pattern and doesn't form a head. Romaine or cos lettuce forms upright, cylindrical heads.
Lettuce grows best at cool temperatures. It becomes bitter and goes to seed in summer heat, but you can find types touted as more heat-tolerant.
how to Grow Lettuce
Propagation
Learn how to grow even better lettuce.
Harvest Tips
Begin picking outer leaves of butterhead, loose-leaf, and romaine lettuce varieties when they are 2 inches long. Continue to harvest outer leaves as long as the flavor remains good. You can also cut the entire plant at the base when it reaches the desired size. Extend the harvest season by sowing small patches of lettuce every three weeks until late spring, then again in late summer for fall harvest.
garden plans for Lettuce
more varieties for Lettuce
'Buttercrunch' butterhead lettuce
'Ithaca' head lettuce
'Lollo Rossa' leaf lettuce
'Marvel of Four Seasons' butterhead lettuce
'Outredgeous' romaine lettuce
'Parris Island Cos' romaine lettuce
'Red Salad Bowl' leaf lettuce
'Royal Oak' leaf lettuce
'Summertime' head lettuce
