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.
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Thinning Out Lettuce Seedlings
Once your lettuce seedlings start growing, you may notice that some are too close together. You can harvest the baby lettuce plants that are too crowded and give them a good wash and eat them, roots and all.
Caring For Your Growing Lettuce
Lettuce requires quite a bit of water. As with most vegetables make sure it gets at least 1″ or 2.5 cm of water a week, whether it be from rain or manual watering that you do.
Make sure the water supply you are using is clean. You can use rainwater but there are some precautions you need to take to ensure the water is not tainted by bird’s droppings. This is too involved to explain in this post but will be covered in a future post.
Fertilizing is also key to having a bumper salad crop.
I prefer giving greens a diluted seaweed fertilizer. It is organic and provides nitrogen to the lettuce plants as well as lots of minerals. If you can’t find it locally, you can order this:
You might also find that in hot summers you will need to shade your lettuce patch. Lettuce when it gets too hot will bolt (send up a seed head) and then it turns bitter and not good to eat.
If you used floating row covers as I explain in How to Use Row Covers to Improve Your Crops, then you can use the supports and just drape shade cloth over them as you did with the row cover. Or you can create a frame covered in shadecloth that can be propped up facing the sun.
You also will need to continue planting (maybe stopping during the really hot weeks of summer) to replace the lettuce that you pick or that bolts and goes to seed. So have enough seeds on hand for several sowings.
How To Pick Lettuce
Once the lettuce leaves are a decent size, you can start harvesting and enjoying the fresh, healthy, safe lettuce in a salad or a sandwich.
Rather than cutting the whole plant, you can harvest just a few leaves from each plant. Then the plant will grow new leaves and you will be able to harvest over several weeks and even months if you are diligent with care and the weather cooperates.
Unless you planted lettuce that produces compact heads such as iceberg. Then you will have to harvest the whole head at one time. However this type of lettuce is not that desirable for taste and for convenience, so I never plant it.
Bring along a collection container if you are harvesting more than a handful of leaves. I just use the bowl of my salad spinner.
Usually you can just break off the leaves where they join the stem but in some cases a clean pair of kitchen scissors or a knife works well to avoid damaging the plant.
How To Clean Freshly Picked Lettuce
Usually lettuce leaves are fairly clean unless you have had a rain and soil has splashed up onto the leaves. I know some people who eat the lettuce without washing it. But there is some risk of contamination even with homegrown lettuce, so it is safer to wash your lettuce before eating it.
I don’t recommend using anything other than fresh clean water. There are various produce washes but I question their safety in terms of what is inside of the washes.
Either spray them off with a steady stream of water from your tap (if you have a “shower” setting on your kitchen tap, use that) or fill a bowl or the sink with cold water and agitate them for a minute or so in there.
Remember to look for bugs! Sometimes you might get some slugs, cabbage worms or aphids and these usually wash off easily. If you find a leaf that is heavily infested, don’t harvest it for eating, but still remove it from the plant and dispose of it.
Ideally use a salad spinner to dry off the leaves. Dressing doesn’t stick to wet leaves so this is key. You should be able to find a salad spinner locally, but here’s a good one you can order:
If you don’t have a salad spinner, just shaking the leaves over the sink will work and you can then pat them down between two kitchen paper towels to dry them further. Or you could do like Mr. Bean and wash your lettuce in your sock.
How To Prepare Your Lettuce
The best thing when you grow your own lettuce is eating it! Once harvested you can use the lettuce on a sandwich or in a salad.
For salads I like to use a simple dressing as you still want to taste the ingredients. You can make your own or buy a quality organic dressing. There are even dried organic dressing mixes such as this one:
If you grow herbs you can even use those in the dressing. Having your own olive trees and pressing your own oil might be a bit of a stretch though!
Growing A Salad Container Garden
If you grow your own lettuce in a large enough container, you can create what I call a container salad garden.
Add a tomato plant in the middle surrounded by lettuce on the edges. Or perhaps you’d prefer a bell pepper plant. Or some basil or green onion. In a really big container throw in some radishes too.
Learn more on how easy it is to create by watching this video:
Then you have a one-stop place to grab most of the ingredients for a salad or sandwich!
If you have some outdoor space, whether it is a backyard, front yard, balcony or patio you can grow your own lettuce. It is one of the easiest vegetables to grow and with the health scares of the past few years especially just recently, it’s worth the small amount of effort and work.
And yes, you can learn how to grow romaine lettuce at home so that you can still have your Caesar salads! In fact grow some of your own garlic as well.
