Summer Salads: How to Harvest Fresh Lettuce All Summer Long
While pre-packed bags of lettuce seem like a hassle-free option for summer salads, a lot of people don’t realise how easy it is to grow your own tasty leaves all summer long. Plus, the flavour you’ll get will be so much better and fresher – once you’ve started, you’ll wonder why you’ve never tried it before!
There are a couple of different ways to extend your lettuce harvest: looseleaf cut-and-come-again varieties, and the continuous picking of hearting lettuce varieties. With a bit of planning and the right cropping technique, you could be harvesting leaves regularly for many months, saving you a lot of time and money in the process.
How to Grow 'Cut-And-Come-Again' Lettuce
Non-hearting looseleaf varieties of lettuce are perfect for a cut-and-come-again approach. This simply means picking the outer leaves and allowing the centre to produce new ones. Lettuce plants are quite resilient when it comes to this practice, and if you do it right, you can get many harvests from a single plant. We recommend several lettuce sowings two weeks apart for optimum picking, growing, and plant health. Here’s our quick step-by-step guide to sowing cut-and-come-again lettuce:
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- Sow your lettuce seeds in containers, beds, borders, or plots. Watering the soil before sowing will help germination. Sow your seeds in rows 10-15cm apart or broadcast over the surface.
- Remove any weeds that appear and keep your seedlings well watered.
- When the leaves have reached a good size, you can snip them off leaving around 2.5cm at the base.
- Keep watering regularly to help the plant produce new leaves.
- You will get multiple cuttings from the same plant, but the leaves will eventually become tough or bitter, or the plant will try to flower. At this point, lift the plant and compost is and prepare it for resowing.
Keep in mind that lettuce grown in containers is more prone to bolting, especially if the weather is warm or the pots aren’t deep enough.
Other salad leaves like spinach, rocket, mibuna, and mizuna are also excellent for the cut-and-come-again approach. Here are a few lettuce varieties you could try this year:
Gourmet Looseleaf Mix
Black Seeded Simpson
Curly Mix
Continuous Picking for Hearting Lettuces
You can plant lettuce varieties that form hearts, but you don’t have to wait to dig them up when they’re ready. Another way to have fresh salad all summer is to carefully harvest the outer lettuce leaves as they’re growing. Some studies have shown that up to 80% of a lettuce’s photosynthesis comes from the core, so harvesting the outer leaves won’t stop your plants from growing.
When your lettuces are growing strong and look to be a decent size, you can start the process by removing the old, yellowing leaves from the outer layer first. This has the added bonus of helping make your plants less attractive to slugs. You can then pick the next layer off by hand, taking care not to damage the central growing point of the plant. As long as you leave the core alone, your lettuce should keep growing leaves, though the more you pick off, the longer it will take to replenish. While you’re there, this is the perfect time to do some weeding which will also help deter slugs from the area.
Here are a few hearting varieties of lettuce that you can grow to harvest this way:
Little Gem
Red Romaine Cos
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