Harvesting Head Lettuce - Mini Romaine Type #shorts #garden #lettuce
Channel: Escaping The Daily Grind
Date: 23/11/2023

Lettuce is a wonderful vegetable to grow in the home garden.  They are prolific, fairly easy to grow and require very little in the way of soil and nutrient requirements.  In fact you can get away with just adding nitrogen to your soil and still grow a decent head of lettuce.  Now I do recommend adding more than just nitrogen, because it will help with the overall health of your plant, but since we harvest only the leafy greens of lettuce, nitrogen is the most important nutrient we need to give our lettuce.  

Head lettuce is different than leaf lettuce in that you generally pick the entire plant to harvest all the leaves at once.  On leaf lettuce, you can use the cut and come again method where the plant stays in the ground growing while you pick the older leaves and leave the plant to grow more before harvesting again.  In head lettuce you generally harvest the entire plant and do not come again for another harvest with that specific plant.  This is why I stagger my planting of head lettuce.  I have some full sized Romaine growing next to these that take just a little longer to grow.  Once I finish harvesting all of these mini romaine, I will be able to start harvesting my full size Romaine and extend my harvest window.  

There are two seasons I plant romaine lettuce.  Once in late summer or early fall, and the other in late winter or early spring.  Lettuce likes cooler climates for growing.  I live in Texas, so our summers are too hot for even peppers and tomatoes, let alone lettuce.  And unfortunately we also get some freezing days in the winter, so late fall and early spring are the only time that works to grow lettuce.  Lettuce can handle light frost, but not temps below 25 degrees without being protected.