What're your number of lettuce plants?

[SprigOfTheLivingDead]

It all boils down to these questions:

1. How many lettuce plants are the right amount?
2. Do you keep germinating and planting more over the course of a season?

Both in summer and winter I normally grow peppers and tomatoes, you know, plants that just keep producing and producing and aren't necessarily single use. However, this winter i tried growing some lettuce and though I liked the end product for a couple of salads I found you couldn't just harvest a leaf or two as if you messed up on watering and a leaf burned it could potentially lead to rot, ... And the plant essentially reaches the end of its cycle after two months or so and is shooting to produce seeds.

So, for those of you that are growing lettuce for a family how many plants do you have going at a given time and do you harvest the whole plant or just cut the leaves off and harvest from the same plant for a few months?

I'm not familiar with lettuce so this is new to me. I'm curious if I should trying to have a rotation going where I put new seeds to soil every month or 3 weeks to make sure I'm able to just harvest 3 full plants for a salad when we want it.

 

[seedcorn]

Waiting as well. Unfortunately I have sand/gravel and lettuce doesn’t do real well. With heat, turns bitter. Leaf lettuce I use, I plant in rows. Butternut and butter crunch never form the nice heads the package shows....

 

[digitS']

It may be that geography has some important influence on lettuce. That seems like it should be obviously so but there are certainly widely popular varieties. I have my preference for growing but they don't meet DW's preferences for flavor. She is far more of a salad eater than I am. Shoot, I like "wilted" lettuce better than raw. For those of you that don't know that this is a dish, do a search. For everyone, bacon doesn't have to be one of the ingredients (it is just really tasty that way ).

Anyway, summer crisp (Batavian) varieties have done well, Nevada, especially so.

I put leaf lettuce transplants in the garden, not seeds. Seeds are sown in 6 packs at about 4 to 6 seeds each. Plants are cut at the soil line one at a time. All will be harvested within a week or two of each other and the roots can go in the compost. Growing them like that staggers the harvest since they don't develop at the same rate.

More transplants can be ready to set-out started outdoors in 6-packs. Lettuce doesn't need the greenhouse protection after temperatures warm a little but transplanting is still a little more surefire for making good use of garden space.

Later plantings really benefit from afternoon shade but there soon comes a time when it's too dry and hot for lettuce. Lettuce doesn't work very well as a fall crop for me. Cooling is too quick. The plants survive late but grow so slowly that the effort isn't successful.

Steve

 

[SprigOfTheLivingDead]

It may be that geography has some important influence on lettuce. That seems like it should be obviously so but there are certainly widely popular varieties. I have my preference for growing but they don't meet DW's preferences for flavor. She is far more of a salad eater than I am. Shoot, I like "wilted" lettuce better than raw. For those of you that don't know that this is a dish, do a search. For everyone, bacon doesn't have to be one of the ingredients (it is just really tasty that way ).

Anyway, summer crisp (Batavian) varieties have done well, Nevada, especially so.

I put leaf lettuce transplants in the garden, not seeds. Seeds are sown in 6 packs at about 4 to 6 seeds each. Plants are cut at the soil line one at a time. All will be harvested within a week or two of each other and the roots can go in the compost. Growing them like that staggers the harvest since they don't develop at the same rate.

More transplants can be ready to set-out started outdoors in 6-packs. Lettuce doesn't need the greenhouse protection after temperatures warm a little but transplanting is still a little more surefire for making good use of garden space.

Later plantings really benefit from afternoon shade but there soon comes a time when it's too dry and hot for lettuce. Lettuce doesn't work very well as a fall crop for me. Cooling is too quick. The plants survive late but grow so slowly that the effort isn't successful.

Steve

Wahoo! That's what I was looking for.

Not sure about your wilted lettuce drive, but I'll stay with more crisp