Lettuce (Lactuca sativa) has got to be one of the easiest things to grow. Between 28 and 60 days from seed to salad bowl. It comes up quickly and is ready to cut within about four weeks as a micro-green. It’s one of the first things you seed into the ground. It’s also one of the things you can keep seeding every two weeks until temps reach a steady 85-90F during the day and don’t drop below 65 or so at night. Even then, though, you can arrange things in your garden – or your container – to help stall lettuce from bolting (going to seed) and getting bitter. Some shade during the hottest part of the day helps a lot. You can move a salad table or container into a place that gets dappled shade mid-day. In the garden, you can plant lettuces in the shade of cukes or beans growing up a sun-ward trellis. You can also choose bolt-resistant and heat tolerant lettuce varieties. Many are available now.
In a symbiotic supply-demand link, now that home vegetable gardeners’ numbers are growing by leaps and bounds, seed companies are offering scads of lettuce varieties. There’s nearly a lettuce for every portion of our sometimes-mercurial growing season here in Maryland. There are varieties that can, with help and a relatively mild winter, over-winter, or at least keep going well into December if you plant them in September and keep cutting. There are lettuces –arugula and romaine are good candidates — that you can plant almost as early as February, (ground temps need to be about 45F or above), though they do much better if you use a little ground-warming dark plastic followed by a season-extender like row cover or a cold frame. There are Romaine aka cos whose stiff leaves are used in Caesar salads and make great boats for quick hot-weather wraps with shrimp, avocado, scallion and a drizzle of chili oil and tamari. There are red-leafed everything these days and lettuces in mesclun (mixed) packs that offer a wonderful salad bowl for the cutting — nearly all are good for several cuttings before they give out. Even head lettuces will often send up new leaves after a strategic cutting.
You can keep yourself in salads nearly all season by making short, successive sowings every other week. You can grow lettuce in a garden, as a border in a perennial bed (provided you don’t use pesticides and weird chemicals on the plants behind it) or in a container.
Lettuce is easy to grow, but it does have several pests. Slugs are one (and if anyone had figured out how to eat a slug and enjoy it, lemme know!). They slime their ways up from the ground and into the heads so you sometimes have a little surprise when you break the head apart to wash it. Simple slugs traps work quite well; I’ve got a covered plastic thing you put beer in. The slugs crawl in and drown. There are also a number of other lettuce pests – leafhoppers, aphids, caterpillars in fall. Generally, they can be effectively controlled by horticultural soap spray. (I managed to whack back a thrips attack in my little home greenhouse with only one soap spray application, for example).
Ladybugs eat aphids, though their larvae eat way more than their fully formed adult selves. Cultivating a mixed garden that encourages beneficial insects to thrive usually takes care of most pests. Also if gardeners cultivate an appreciation for the ultimate tithing in ecology (you give 10% of whatever to help keep it all going and you get to keep 90% or so of your labor — if the critters want more than that, they’re just ungrateful and deserve whatever they get). Work toward but don’t expect perfection, and you’ll have plenty.
At right is a ladybug consuming and aphid. At left is a ladybug larvae consuming an aphid.
https://www.growit.umd.edu/VegetableProfiles/GE114Lettuce.pdf
There are some good books on Integrated Pest Management that will help.
The Encyclopedai of Natural Insect and Disease Control edited by Roger B. Yepson, Jr.
IPM for Gardeners: A Guide to INtegrated Pest Management by Raymond A. Cloyd, Philip L. Nixon and Nancy R. Pataky
Ecology for Gardeners by Steven B. Carroll and Steven D. Salt
Pests & Diseases of Herbaceous Perennials by Stanton Gill, Raymond A. Cloyd, James R. Baker, David L. Clement and Ethel Dutky — this one does not deal with vegetable crops, but does have lots of terrific pics and great info that will help in the veg garden
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