Growing Lettuce At Home: Easily Learn How In A Few Simple Steps
Don’t trust buying lettuce anymore as you can’t guarantee it’s safety? Growing lettuce at home is not hard and here’s how to do it in a few easy steps!
So you are taking a chance with your health every time you buy pre-packaged, pre-washed lettuce and greens.
Rather than stop eating lettuce and greens altogether, you can learn how to grow lettuce at home following these simple steps. Growing lettuce is one of the easiest vegetables to grow.
Pick What Lettuce You Will Grow
Be sure to buy your seeds from a reputable seed supplier. There are so many different variety of lettuces and you may want to try a few varieties you may never have eaten.
Mix and match the colours. There are red lettuces and various shades of green. These can look great together even in a flower bed or a container if you don’t have the room for a dedicated garden bed for growing lettuce.
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The Best Location For Growing Lettuce
The good thing about lettuce and other greens is that they do not need lots of full sun. In fact they can even grow in light shade. This makes finding a location much easier especially if you have a small garden with trees and other structures.
You can grow lettuce at home in flower beds and in containers or in a traditional vegetable bed, be it a raised bed or simply cleared land.
If you are growing lettuce in containers, consider placing the container close to your kitchen. Perhaps you have a deck like I have and can place the container on the deck next to the kitchen door. This makes it easy to grab a few lettuce leaves for a sandwich or a salad when preparing lunches for your family.
If you have children, build them their own children’s garden planter box to grow a salad garden of lettuces, a tomato plant or two and perhaps also a cucumber vine. Or even if you don’t have children, you can build one of these planter boxes for yourself!
And you can also grow lettuce in a protected area such as a coldframe, hoop house or greenhouse, so that you can enjoy eating fresh lettuce even in the depths of winter.
Prepare The Soil For Growing Lettuce
Lettuce does not have deep roots, so you do not need a deep raised bed like you would for root vegetables like carrots or brassicas like broccoli that send down a larger root to support the weight of the plant.
Lettuce can also be ground in-ground in uncultivated soil.
Just loosen (cultivate) the top inch or couple of centimetres of soil. Remove any weeds loosened by your cultivation. Rake the surface level. At this point you may want to moisten the soil before planting the lettuce if it is dry.
Prepare A Container For Growing Lettuce
For growing lettuce in containers, the container does not have to be too deep. I have actually successfully grown lettuce in a shallow dish-like planter with only about 2 inches (5 centimetres) of soil.
If you want to make a complete salad garden container (more on that below) however, you will need a deeper container.
Ensure the container has a drainage hole. If the hole(s) are big, add small pieces of newspaper to cover the holes so soil doesn’t fall through then you fill the container.
Get a good quality sterile potting soil. If you start with a sterile mix you won’t introduce any diseases into the container. Fill up the container, leaving about an inch or 2 centimetres of space at the top.
You can optionally mix in an organic fertilizer that will slowly release it’s nutrients into the soil. But I’ll revisit fertilizing again below.
How To Sow Lettuce Seeds
Following the spacing outlined on the seed package, sprinkle the seeds on top of the soil. Don’t worry too much about seed spacing though as later you can thin them out and eat the thinnings.
If you are growing lettuce in the ground, you may want to consider doing rows for easier weeding and cultivating, so prepare for that by using a rake or other tool’s handle to keep the rows straight. Or you could temporarily string a line down the row as a guide.
Now use some extra soil and lightly sprinkle it over the lettuce seeds. The trick here is to cover them but only just enough without burying them too deep. If in doubt consult the seed package for depth recommendations. Usually though it is less than 1/4″ or 1/2 cm.
Watering Lettuce Seeds
Now using the finest shower head on your garden hose or a fine rose on a watering can, water the seeds in. Careful that you don’t wash away the seeds since they are so small!
For the first few days and perhaps even as long as a week make sure to keep the soil surface damp. Otherwise the seeds won’t sprout. You can cover the seeds with some newspaper wetted down or some floating row cover or even plastic sheet. Just remember to remove it when the seeds start sprouting.