A simple salad is the best kind of salad in my book. I do like ornate and composed salads from time to time, don’t get me wrong, but still… A handful of lettuce leaves with a drizzle of olive oil and a touch of balsamic vinegar, a little salt, no more, no less, can’t be beat.
I am in a special lettuce happiness mood these days because after a frustrating series of mostly failed (or half failed) lettuce plantings I finally got a colorful plant carpet for baby lettuce salad. I have been harvesting for a couple of weeks now. I am so, so happy!
For the whole summer and most of the fall it seemed that every time I tried to seed lettuce we would get a heat wave. Forget it then! No lettuce is going to germinate when the surface soil temperature is 100F — in the shade.
If I can figure out a cool enough place to do it out of the reach of critters, next summer I’ll be growing lettuce seedlings in pots before putting them in the ground. A major bother, given the amount of plants I will need to produce, but it beats repeated failed germination. If only I could find a cool safe place…
Now I need to hurry up and eat it all before the plants grow too much. If am I diligent in my harvesting — and subsequent eating — I can get three passes out of that bed of lettuce before it gets bitter. Provided that weather stays cool, of course. Heat is the bane of sweetness in lettuce!
January 16, 2010 at 10:06 pm
Sorry you had to learn the hard way about summer and lettuce not mixing. I only grow my own during late fall-early summer (usually pretty foggy and cool in coastal So Cal).
January 18, 2010 at 12:04 am
Yep, you’re right! Summer and lettuce don’t mix. I am just stubborn. I keep thinking that the farmers at the market bring lettuce all summer long so there’s gotta be a way to do it. So I keep trying different timing variations and so far I’ve managed it about one out of every three summers. It is not good enough because the space that I am devoting to failed lettuce could be better used for peppers or melons. I guess those farmers are working in good flatland and not in rocky mountains or in containers, like you and I are doing. I should follow the schedule you propose and stop wasting my time and garden space.