How to Grow Perfect Lettuce All Summer Long

One of the mind-blowing skills I learned at the gardening boot camp I attended last summer concerned growing lettuce.  Good lettuce.  Great lettuce.

But not just lettuce in the spring and fall.  All season long, with that season lasting from as soon as the soil can be worked in spring, which by all appearances may be late February this year, and continuing until the first hard freeze of fall.  (Last year we had record-breaking amounts of snow, beginning in late October and lasting until nearly May.  For most of January I’ve been looking at the yard and thinking that if it were just one or two degrees warmer, it would be time to head outside.) 

Like many of you, I start a wide variety of vegetable seeds indoors to get a good jump on the garden.  I almost always start some lettuce in early March, put them in the ground in late March or early April, wait what seems like forever for them to mature, and then get inundated with a lot of lettuce before the heat turns up.  And then, no good lettuce for a couple of months until the temperatures cool.

Well, last August, Mr. DeMille taught the class members a better way.

Starting

For starters, we didn’t use the usual plastic six-packs with 10 six-packs to a tray.  William used 200-cell flats that occupy just about the same amount of space.  (I think they’re ¼” smaller.)  Being the little smarty pants that I am, I only bought the 200-cell flats (you can get them on Amazon), and not the trays to hold them.  Of course, I have trays.  Loads, and they’re just a little bigger, so I reasoned that they would work just fine.  No, they don’t.  They 200-cell trays are quite a bit shallower and won’t sit flat in the trays that hold 10 six-packs.  At least, they don’t sit flat in mine.  So then I had to buy the flat trays that are the right size for the 200-cell trays.

Next, we filled the trays with potting mix.  William had some rather fine potting mix blended with compost that we used to fill the trays.  I used seed starting mix because I really didn’t have anything very fine outside, and I didn’t feel like making it in the cold.  Fill the 200-cell trays level with the potting mix and shake the trays to settle the soil. Water well and let the water drain.  Do this three times.

Then spread four fingers out and place one finger in each cell, four across, and tamp the soil down in the middle of each cell.  Using four fingers at a time will get the job done quickly, requiring less than a minute to make depressions for the seeds in the 200-cell trays. 

Pick up your lettuce seed and shake approximately ¼ teaspoon of seed into your hand.  Drop 2-5 seeds in each depression.  Cover the seeds with additional soil.  Do not tamp this down.  Do water the tray one more time.

Transplanting

The lettuce seeds should germinate in 3-5 days.  Keep them well watered, moist, but not soaking.  In 2-3 weeks they’ll be ready to transplant into the garden.  Plop them in anywhere you have soil prepared and which will get at least six hours of sun daily, about 3-4” apart. 

And then start another tray of lettuce seed.

Harvesting

Instead of waiting until you have a grocery store-sized head of lettuce, harvest the greens when they are tender—about 4” tall—and haven’t had the chance to bolt due to the heat.  These baby greens will be perfectly tender and lack any hint of bitterness. 

Because our winter has been so mild this year, I think I’m going to gamble and start a tray of lettuce the 2^nd or 3^rd week of February, assuming the current weather patterns hold.  Yeah, it’s risky, but hey, you only live once.