Love for Lettuce

This year I got my lettuce started on time and have been really pleased to have fresh salad greens available at home throughout the early spring. It can be so hard to wait for the warm weather crops to get growing, which makes rows of tasty lettuce all the more delightful! Lettuce is an easy crop to grow in cool weather, in a small space, and with minimal fuss, and you can easily find a couple of different varieties to liven up your salad bowl. Lettuce is definitely going to be a staple in my kitchen garden going forward!

I sowed seeds from three different types of lettuce this year: Little Gem and Merveille des Quatre Saisons from Baker Creek Seeds, and a Salad Bowl variety from Burpee that I grew last year. All three have done equally well this year and each offers a different color or texture that goes well in combination. I'm using all of these as cut and come again, although the Merveille and Little Gem do form heads (we'll see if I'm patient enough for any to get to that point). I sowed the rows thickly so that I could thin them out as we go through the season, and so far there's still plenty of each growing. I have a row of each in a raised bed in the garden and a large shallow pot of Salad Bowl growing on the patio; the pot actually grew more quickly than the rows, partly because I could move it around for maximum sunlight.

With the pandemic making grocery runs more complicated, it's hard to keep a lot of really fresh produce on hand right now, and the lettuce has been much appreciated as a way to get a garden fresh green into our regular diet. We're experimenting with different salads using canned or packaged ingredients; one favorite has been a salad using canned peaches, pistachios, fresh mint from the garden, and feta cheese. Lettuce is also great for perking up a sandwich, bedding under a bean salad or couscous, or plating with an omelet. The best part is that the lettuce is there when we're ready for it instead of wilting in the fridge.

Our weather this year has been up and down quite a bit, so I don't know how long my lettuce will keep growing before the heat gets to it. If you're in a cooler planting zone you could still plant lettuce for your pandemic victory garden now, assuming you can get the seeds (many online retailers are sold out due to a tremendous surge in demand). Next year I hope to add even more varieties of lettuce to the early garden now that I know how easy it is to grow in containers as well as beds. What varieties of lettuce do you grow? I'd love some suggestions for the 2021 garden!