Best Cut and Come Again Lettuce
When I had a market garden, I grew 200-foot rows of lettuce. The rows contained my ain mixture of lettuce varieties, called for sense of taste, color, and leaf shape, and I cut the leaves immature for the mesclun mix I sold to local chefs. Twice a week my two young assistants and I knelt in the white clover pathways to shear the baby plants.
About of the dozen or so lettuce varieties were the type described as cutting lettuces, which obligingly and vigorously sprout a fresh crop of leaves when they are snipped off just a couple of inches above the ground. They are often called cut-and-come up-over again lettuces.
Cut lettuces are mostly non-heading leafage varieties from two groups, Thou Rapids and oakleaf. The Chiliad Rapids grouping produces wide, crinkled, and frilly leaves, while the oakleaf varieties have a flatter and distinctively lobed leaves. Both groups include red and dark-green varieties and several red-green combinations. All make slap-up garden design elements.
Paint the garden with lettuce
Whatever else I grow, I always have plenty of 'Black Seeded Simpson', an heirloom. I don't carp with lilliputian packets; I buy it by the ounce, nigh 25,000 seeds. Properly stored, lettuce seed stays viable for three years. 'Black Seeded Simpson' is so reliable I use it every bit the standard for judging the germination success of other varieties. A fast grower, it produces crinkly, juicy, yellowish-green leaves. Its but shortcoming is a tendency to bolt in summertime heat; it does best in jump and fall here on Long Isle.
One of the best summer performers I accept establish is romaine: a French cos, 'Craquerelle du Midi'. When every other lettuce in my garden is getting bitter or defiantly announcing its plans to set seed, this i stays mild and leafy.
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The red or green lobed leaves of the oakleaf types are pillars of the looseleaf institution. There are at to the lowest degree half-a-dozen varieties of each color normally found in seed catalogs. 'Oakleaf' is the original old standby that yields crisp, tender, lite green leaves and keeps going through moderate estrus. Although it has securely lobed leaves, 'Salad Basin' is not a truthful oakleaf. Merely it is an All-America Selections winner that produces rosettes of delicate lime-green leaves and also has skilful rut tolerance.
Tops for reliability, even through a hot summer, is 'Ruby-red Sails'. Another All-America Selections winner, it's a fast grower with green and reddish-bronze leaves.
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A 1998 introduction that did well for me was 'Green Vision', which produces dark-dark-green, glossy, savoyed leaves; information technology is a boring bolter. 'Lollo Rossa' has light-greenish leaves with elegant rosy margins, while its cousin, 'Lollo Biondo', is pure pale-green. Both 'Lollo' cultivars are deeply curled and heat tolerant, and very decorative both in the garden and in salads.
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Stepping across the looseleaf varieties, there are some butterheads and romaine I like to grow as cut lettuces. They will likewise sprout new leaves, if less energetically than the looseleaf varieties.
Of the butterheads, 'Ermosa' has dark green leaves and stands up to a off-white amount of summer heat. In a weak pre-jump moment, I ordered seed for romaine called 'Freckles' or 'Trout Dorsum', simply because I liked its name. I wish all my weak moments worked out this well. Information technology is beautiful lettuce, lime-green flecked with wine-red markings and has a fresh, frail taste.
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Better means to sow small seeds
Because they are harvested while very immature, cutting lettuces can be planted in adequately dense bands. Instead of dissemination seed, information technology is simply as easy to sow rows well-nigh three inches apart, with i⁄ii inch to 1 inch betwixt plants in the row. I have plant that information technology takes less fourth dimension to plant seed carefully than to thin seedlings; besides, if non done properly, thinning oft disturbs the roots of the seedlings that are left.
At that place are several means to sow seed to eliminate thinning. The simplest is to mix the seed with dry out builder'southward sand (not salty beach sand), using about twice as much sand as seed. This makes information technology easier to dribble seeds at fairly fifty-fifty spacing down a marked row. An inexpensive piffling gadget that distributes seed much better than a seed packet is the Seed Sower, which has v different-size outlets to control the flow of seeds down a tapered spout.
For garden rows, my sometime reliable is an Earthway Seeder, for which I now take a dozen seed plates for different seed types and spacings. It makes a furrow, plants the seed at any depth I want, covers it, and firms the basis, all in one laissez passer.
Final season I experimented with the Pinpoint Precision Seeder, which tin can handle half-dozen seed sizes. It'south smaller and more than maneuverable than the Earthway, and works well with a finely tilled, droppings-costless bed, but is a bit choosy in less-than-perfect weather. A larger version sows four rows 2-ane⁄4 inches apart, perfect for mesclun.
If plenty space is available, or merely to misfile pests, I sometimes skip the cut-and-come-again routine in favor of harvest, hoe, rake, and reseed. I harvest the young plants, roots and all, stir the soil up with a stirrup hoe, rake the bed flat, and sow fresh seed.
Keep the soil rich
Lettuce likes a fairly rich, sandy loam. I till the beds and let them settle for a calendar week earlier applying about an inch of well-rotted manure or compost, which I work into the about-surface zone with the stirrup hoe. Subsequently harvesting leaves, I revive the plants with a weakfish or seaweed emulsion, or manure tea. I take a siphon gadget on my drip irrigation system that allows me to feed emulsion or filtered manure tea down the lines. Most drip systems can be fitted with something similar.
Lettuce will grow, if not thrive, in less than ideal soil, but 1 thing it must have is h2o, about an inch per week. Baste irrigation puts h2o only where a plant needs information technology. Overhead watering wastes a lot of water, and at the wrong fourth dimension, such as late in the 24-hour interval or in hot, muggy weather, encourages fungal diseases.
Slugs love lettuce as much every bit I do, but luckily they seem to prefer beer. A few saucers of stale beer help them drown their sorrows and themselves. I tried saccharide h2o once, which worked, but my bees liked information technology fifty-fifty more the slugs did.
Cutworms can be a hassle, but ordinarily, they won't do too much damage to a fairly dense band of plants. Untilled soil tin harbor cutworms, and then I till my beds in leap while the atmospheric condition is still cold plenty to kill overwintered cutworm pupae and eggs. If cutworms get a existent trouble, I add parasitic nematodes to the soil well-nigh a week before planting.
How to grow lettuce
In the home garden, sowing every week will ensure a constant and generous supply of lettuce. Each sowing yields iii or four cuttings before the plants are wearied. As a rough guide to quantity, sowing about 3 feet of row every week volition proceed one omnivorous developed well supplied with salad from spring to autumn; a vegetarian might eat twice as much.
Lettuces prefer absurd temperatures, but by sowing every week, choosing oestrus-tolerant varieties, and using shade-cloth tunnels, I tin produce lettuce right through my Zone 7 summers. It is easy to keep the supply going right into wintertime by growing winter varieties in common cold frames or tunnels of row-cover fabric. The same tunnels can be used, covered instead with 50 pct shade cloth, to protect heat-sensitive lettuce from the summer sun.
And just considering information technology's hot doesn't mean I stop sowing lettuce. When temperatures hit the 80s, lettuce seeds volition non germinate, so I start seeds in flats in a absurd room indoors and set up the plants in the garden when they have two sets of true leaves.
From early spring until the start of winter, I cutting lettuces and go on several salad bowls generously supplied. But lettuce is good for more than but salads. Attempt it in a creamy soup or wrapped around vinegared sushi rice for a tempting appetizer.
Sources
Burpee
300 Park Ave.
Warminster, PA 18991
800-888-1447
www.burpee.com
The Melt'southward Garden
PO Box 535
Londonderry, VT 05148
800-457-9703
Hermosa Valley Garden Seeds
PO Box 1409
Santa Maria, CA 93456
877-834-7333
Johnny's Selected Seeds
955 Benton Avenue
Winslow, ME 04901
877-564-6697
www.johnnysseeds.com
gustavsonsigne1962.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.finegardening.com/project-guides/fruits-and-vegetables/cut-and-come-again-lettuce-sampler
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