Chives, radishes and pretty lettuce waiting for a salad.
Lettuce and spinach growing in a raised bed garden.
Pretty lettuce mix growing in my garden.
- As soon as the soil can be worked in the spring, plant one row of seeds. Water and wait two weeks.
- Every two weeks after your first planting, plant another row of lettuce, until you have three or four rows.
- Once your first row is mature enough to pick, pick only the large outer leaves. Don’t pick it all at once and don’t pull up the plants. I use either my kitchen scissors to snip off leaves or I just pinch them off with my finger tips.
- Once you see the lettuce bolting, pull up the whole plant. Remove as many leaves as you can and compost the rest of the plant.
- Try some of the so-called hot-weather varieties of lettuce for summer salads. “Red Sails” is a red-leaf or bronze leaf variety (the red one in the photo above) that tastes great, adds a pop of color to your salads, and is fairly heat-tolerant. Any loose-leaf varieties do a little better in the heat than Romaine or Buttercrunch, which really don’t like heat at all. “Ithaca” is a green-leaf variety that is also slow to bolt.
Another salad green tip: grow spinach just for salads. I find that you need a lot of room to grow enough spinach for a meal when you like cooked spinach. I added a few rows of spinach to my garden just for the greens. They also make tasty salads, especially when you pick the tender baby spinach leaves.
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Jeanne Grunert is a certified Virginia Master Gardener and the author of several gardening books. Her garden articles, photographs, and interviews have been featured in The Herb Companion, Virginia Gardener, and Cultivate, the magazine of the National Farm Bureau. She is the founder of The Christian Herbalists group and a popular local lecturer on culinary herbs and herbs for health, raised bed gardening, and horticulture therapy.
When you talked about lettuce bolting I had a lovely picture of a crowd of lettuce plants running hell for leather.
Have to get my lettuce in a store and of course the selection is limited.
LOL! It is a real term (bolting). But I like your mental image better.
Yup, I did know that, but haven’t heard it in years.
I haven’t heard of a few of your tips for coping in warm weather. I like lettuce, but so do my resident snails and slugs. And, I have let some continue to bolt and flower – becoming interesting ornamentals in my front yard garden with the other, well, ornamentals.
Ray