Growing Organic Lettuce

Fresh, Delicious, Healthy and Tasty

Apr 25, 2009 Troy Coverdale

The most reliable and easiest to grow salad ingredient from May to July is lettuce, which offers more possibilities than are commonly known.

With pre-washed bags of salad leaves costing a lot of money from supermarkets - with ever increasing 'trendy' names; such as 'bistro mix' , 'herb mix' why bother wasting your money when you can spend pence and be harvesting your own delicious selection of salad leaves and eating them within minutes.

Lettuce comes in many shapes, colours and rates of growth.

• Leaf lettuce is the quickest to harvest, within six weeks from sowing on average, either by cutting with a knife or by repeatedly and carefully picking a few outer leaves. Picking like this, instead of cutting, will prolong plant lives considerably, to the point that just three sowings of lettuce can provide a steady supply of leaves from May to October. About thirty or forty plants at a spacing of 25-30cm apart will provide sufficient leaves for most families over the growing season.

• Hearting lettuce needs longer to mature, from two to three months growing time, and offers only one picking. Hearts may be cos/romaine (Little Gem, Lobjoits, Rubens Red), butterhead (Buttercrunch, Marvel of Four Seasons), crisphead (Webbs Wonderful, Regina di Ghiacchi) or batavian (Grenoble Red, Maravilla di Verano). Some hearting varieties such as Rubens Red and Grenoble Red can also be consistently picked over for leaves. Note that lettuce likes gentle warmth and moisture, with no extremes, so is well-suited to the British climate.

The most common enemy of the humble lettuce plant is the slug! Organic control methods for this damaging pest are still fairly limited. Using beer traps or copper strips can offer some protection, but if your growing area comes under prolonged attack then manual removal is really the only way to keep them at bay. Slugs are most active at dusk, so doing a thorough 'slug-patrol' with a torch may bring some inquisitive looks from your neighbours, but will allow you to pick off and 'rehome' to an area of land where they can do no damage.

Other ways to limit the damage that slugs cause, would be to ensure that there is no long grass growing within reach of your salad beds - keep all edges and lawn margins well mown to ensure this. Slugs do not like travelling along stone or concrete as it dries their slime trails out - so the less herbacious growth between your treasured food crops the better.

Another good way of limiting slug damage would be to grow your crops in containers or tubs that can be positioned in places where slugs cannot get to - i.e on window sills or on raised platforms - slugs are not very good at climbing up vertical surfaces.

Have a good browse through garden centre seed racks or a catalogue to pick out a good range of seeds. In leaf lettuce I recommend Bijou and Redina for deep red colour, Aruba for red oakleaf, Catalogna for large green oakleaf, Amorina for pink-red crinkled leaves, Bergamo for bright green crinkled leaves, Grenoble Red for crunchy leaves with some resistance to slugs, Chartwell for dark green cos leaves and Freckles for tender leaves with maroon freckles!

Sowing a few seeds of each variety will give a pleasing multi-coloured look to the garden, and an appetising range of colour, texture and flavour to the salad bowl. Note that lettuce seed keeps for up to five years so the cost of a large number of seed packets can be spread over many sowings.