Do you like to eat salad? Then why not grow lettuce because you can harvest it several times a year. Find out everything about cultivation here.
The advantages of fresh lettuce are clearly that they thrive in the open air and in window boxes, grow extremely quickly and can therefore be harvested (picked) several times during the season. They are therefore very different from the cut salads. After a single cut, these cannot be harvested again. So give it a try and just grow your own lettuce.
Good strains to grow
Well-known varieties include oak leaf lettuce, lollo rosso, Batavia and finger lettuce. Special seed mixtures for different types of lettuce are also available from specialist retailers. Today, lettuce is also offered as a seed tape, which means that it is no longer necessary to separate it later. So just pick a few different flavors from the huge selection.
Sowing & care
You can sow lettuce outdoors as early as April. To do this, you have to draw grooves with a depth of about 1.5 centimeters in the ground. Then thinly sow the lettuce seeds in these grooves. Depending on the prevailing frost temperatures, lettuce can even thrive almost all year round in the greenhouse. Sowing in cold frames, raised beds or on the windowsill is also recommended.
➤ Tip:
If frost is to be expected at night, you should protect the seed with a thin garden fleece.
As soon as the small plants become visible after about one to two weeks, you should isolate them if they grow too narrow. From this point on, you should water the plants regularly if necessary. Otherwise, they hardly require any further care.
Unfortunately, the pick-lettuce is not safe from snails. Which is why it is advisable to fight slugs either naturally (e.g. with beer traps) or with more environmentally friendly means such as a slug fence.
Harvest lettuce
The picking lettuce can be harvested for the first time around 6 weeks after sowing. The plants are then about 15 to 20centimeters tall and are considered mature. Then you can pluck off the leaves from the outside inwards. On the other hand, you should leave the sweetheart leaves, because the lettuce will only grow again if the sweetheart leaves remain in the lettuce bed.