If you’re just starting to learn how to garden or want to explore growing your own food, growing lettuce and tomatoes is a great way to start. Here’s a little about lettuce and you’ll find how easy it easy to plant and harvest.

Gardening Tips

• Timing of planting: Lettuce can be grown in the winter in California or climates like California but in some colder areas where it goes below 0, people tend to grow lettuce inside greenhouses or they start seeds inside to get little seedlings to transplant outside. For colder weather, wait until 2-4 weeks after last frost date to plant seeds outside.
  
  
• Temperatures and moisture: Lettuce loves moist well drained soil and prefers all day sun but can handle a bit of shade if it’s a hot area. I live in Southern California and it gets over 100F in the summer so I typically don’t plan lettuce in the summer here, however, I’ve done it a couple of times and I made sure it was shaded by a taller plant like a tomato and that it received the right amount of moisture.
  
  
• Sowing method: Lettuce seeds can be sown just by sprinkling them over your garden bed or pot and working the soil in. Take a look at Vlada’s short video on this topic!
  
  
• Germination: Lettuce takes 1-2 weeks to germinate and you can harvest as short as 4 weeks depending on type of lettuce. If it’s a heartier lettuce, it can take longer.
  
  
• Harvesting: The greatest part of lettuce is that it gives you loads of quantity per harvest. You can use two methods of harvesting depending on type of lettuce: (1) cut and come again method which means you’re just cutting or pulling the outside layers of the lettuce head (the older layers) and leaving the center still growing or you can (2) cut the top of the lettuce off, and let it regrow again from the seeds (you just leave the center in the bed and it will regrow again). Hint: You can also do this with store bought butter lettuce heads. You just cut off everything except the root and leave a little bit of it on the bottom. Or you can directly plant it from the box. Check out this video on replanting store bought lettuce: https://youtu.be/26GM9nyc_PQ
  
  
• Storage: Storing lettuce is also super easy. You just need a bowl, some water, and sometimes people like to wrap the up in a wet paper towel in the fridge. Take a look at the video below on storage.

Lettuce is SUPER easy and it just keeps regrowing. You will have lettuce for a while if you just plant a few batches and it’s healthy, tastes amazingly fresh, nutritious, and way cheaper than going to buy organic lettuce kits in the store.

Recipes

There’s lots of good recipes for salads or salad dressings. Feel free to check out our YouTube channel for those. Here’s a good recipe for Creamy Caesar dressing or and a great Greek Salad recipe with lettuce as its base.

Here’s how mine turned out!

Go and plant some lettuce and tell us all about it! Reach out to us via Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn!