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The Tucson Gardener |
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In the Garden Calendar
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The Lettuce
Factory It's hard to find a really good head of leaf lettuce and the varieties are limited. Produce people have made preparing a salad simple by selling ready packaged mixed greens but you pay a premium and the package doesn't go all that far when you're serving a hungry family. If you've got a vegetable garden, empty pots or even a sunny flower bed available you should try your hand at growing lettuce during Tucson's fall and winter months. The results can be spectacular in appearance and can offer a variety of tastes all winter long. Lettuce is a cool season crop. If the temperature gets too hot the lettuce will quickly bolt sending up a shoot to flower and produce seed. When that happens the lettuce becomes bitter and is ready for the compost bin.
The trick to growing good lettuce is finding the variety or several varieties you like. If you grow lots of different types of lettuce you can harvest your own mesclun which has become popular in the past few years. Mesclun is no more than a mixed variety of small, tender leaves. If you buy your seeds locally, the lettuce varieties available will be limited. If you
want a wide range of choices you'll have to order your seed from one of the catalogs. A
good starting place is
The Cook's Garden
which specializes in lettuce seed. If you're just starting out and don't want to buy a
bunch of different seed packets you might want to try one of The Cook's Garden's lettuce
mixes which will give you plenty of variety.
Readily available buttercrunch is a good basic lettuce that produces firm crunchy heads. Add a purple lettuce like red sails or a red oakleaf and you're on your way to gourmet salad eating. Grow a few heads of curly endive for texture and a few herbs for making your own vinaigrette dressing and one's mouth begins to water. Soil preparation is as simple as adding composted steer manure or any compost you might have so the soil will hold moisture. Raised beds with rich soil work really well for lettuce growing. If you want to grow your lettuce in containers use a good potting soil and add some slow release fertilizers to take care of the plants' nutrient needs for the entire growing season. You can also mix lettuce in with your bedding plants. Some of the deep purple leaf varieties like Merlot would look spectacular mixed in with yellow pansies. Lettuce seed can be sown directly into the soil in rows or broadcast so that it's scattered across the surface area.
Individual plants should be spaced eight or more inches apart so you'll have to thin your seedlings later if you start your lettuce by planting seed directly into the soil. This desert gardener's method is to start seeds in small fiber flats that can be protected from the birds. Later the seedlings are transplanted into six cell plastic packs and transplanted into the garden when the plants are three to four inches tall. Using this method and starting new seeds two weeks apart you'll have new plants to put in the beds as plants are harvested. If watered regularly the plants grown in the plastic pony packs can be held for a long time before they're put in the soil. You can even harvest individual leaves from the young plants before they are ever put in the garden. The biggest pest problems are cut worms that attack young plants as well as grubs in the soil which can eat the roots leaving you with a dead rootless plant. Birds also find the lettuce leaves delectable eating and you'll have to use netting or floating row covers to keep them away. Cabbage loopers are another problem which can be controlled by using floating row covers or you can go out and look for signs of the critters and harvest them each morning to protect your plants. Bt or Bacillus thuringiensis is also a good method for controlling the loopers. When temperatures warm in Spring, the rock squirrels find the lettuce good eating and aphids will go after the underside of the leaves and heart of the plants. Once the lettuce starts to bolt - send up the seed stalk - it's time to pull up the plants and ready your garden for the warm season crops. Floating row covers offer some protection from our December and January frosts. But even without protection the lettuce is good at surviving a few cold nights. The leaf tips may show signs of damage but the lettuce once washed and any discolored spots removed should still provide good eating. You can harvest the leaf lettuce when it's young and tender by removing a few of the outer leaves from the plant. When the plant is mature, you can pull it from the ground and cut off the root system and plant more lettuce. Some varieties can be cut off at ground level and the remaining roots will produce a new plant. Harvest your lettuce one or two heads at a time and wash the leaves and dry thoroughly before storing in a plastic bag in the refrigerator. You can also prepare bags of lettuce by using several different varieties in the mix just like the ready packs you can purchase in the grocery store. As any vegetarian might say, "Let us make salad." (1998) |
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