Do you prefer long leaf lettuce or short leaf lettuce? No matter what kind of variety you choose, lettuce is a cold resistant crop and can grow well in most areas. Cultivate seeds indoors and start planting after the first frost. With luck, you can make delicious homemade lettuce salad in early summer.
- Cultivate Seeds
Select lettuce varieties. What kind of lettuce do you like the best? Most lettuce needs the same care, so if you want to mix different types of salad, you can try to grow more than one type at a time. Buy your favorite lettuce seeds to plant. Here are some popular lettuce planting types:
* Short leaf lettuce. You can use this lettuce in hamburgers and sandwiches, or make a cool and crisp fresh salad.
* Lettuce with long leaves is delicious and crisp.
* Butter head or Boston lettuce. The leaves are soft, green and nutritious.
* Pine leaf varieties. Those bright green, healthy lettuce are often sold in spring, because they prefer warm weather to other types of lettuce.
Decide whether to cultivate lettuce seeds in the city or outdoors. Either way, lettuce can be cultivated well, but indoor cultivation has the opportunity to plant more than one crop in a season. If you want fresh lettuce on the table all summer and autumn, start cultivating more lettuce seeds indoors and later plant them outdoors.
Prepare the plant tray for the seeds. You can use the seed tray you bought in the store, or the carton or carton of your own eggs, or use a fabric grow bag to cultivate vegetable seeds. Fill 1/2 inch of the top of the seed tray with soilless medium. Wetting the medium to prepare for seed sowing.
The seeds already contain the nutrients they need to germinate, so do not plant them directly in the soil. You can buy a growing medium or use perlite, vermiculite and refined water moss to make the medium. Mix together in a ratio of 1:1:1.
As the seeds will be transplanted to the flat ground once germinated, the performance of the seed tray is actually not very important.
Sow seeds 4-6 weeks before the land warms up. This will give them seed germination before the ground becomes soft enough for planting. Distribute the seeds evenly in the seed trays.Use your fingers to gently press them into the growth medium.
Provide sufficient sunlight and water for the seeds. Place the tray in a sunny window and keep the media moist at all times. If it does, the seed may not grow.
A week or so you can cover several layers of newspaper on the seed tray until the seeds germinate. Keep the newspaper wet at all times, and change it when you see green shoots.
Don’t over water the seeds. Excessively wet seeds may not grow.
2. Plant Lettuce
Prepare an area to plant. You should plan to plant lettuce after the last frost in spring. Select an area with good soil drainage and sufficient sunlight. Use a spike or plug aeration or a shovel to remove the soil, stones, sticks and weeds from the area. Compost or fertilizer will be applied about a week before planting seeds.
Lettuce is cold resistant, but under certain conditions, it cannot grow normally. Make sure the soil is not too wet, because it will contain a lot of nitrogen.
Ensure that the soil is rich in humus. Talk to the local nursery staff about how to enrich the soil in your specific area to make it very suitable for growing lettuce.
Plant seedlings. For short leaf lettuce and long leaf lettuce, dig a hole every 16 inches, and for pine leaf lettuce, dig a hole every 8 inches. The hole should be deep enough to accommodate the root ball of the plant. Extract lettuce seedlings from the seed tray and put them into the hole. Tap gently to keep the soil around the root vertical, and water it until it is thoroughly wet.
Use a watering can or nozzle hose diffuser to water the lettuce.
Don’t completely submerge the seedlings in the water; Just make sure the soil is completely wet.
Plant more seeds. On the other side of the garden, you can plant another late seedling, so you will have a longer lettuce growing season. Loosen the soil and then spread seeds on 1/2 inch of soil. A bag of seeds can cover about 100 feet of land.
It is better to plant pine leaf lettuce varieties from seeds. They will grow later, because they are more resistant to heat than short leaf lettuce and long leaf lettuce, and they are unlikely to wither in hot summer.
Water the seeds thoroughly after planting.
Apply fertilizer to lettuce 3 weeks after planting. Use Alfalfa grass powder or slow release fertilizer, which is rich in nitrogen, and can make lettuce grow faster and better.
Keep the lettuce watered. If the leaves look wilted, they need watering. Sprinkle some water on the lettuce every day, and the leaves will look a little soft and weak at any time.
Harvest ripe lettuce leaves. When the lettuce leaves look ready to eat – they should be like the lettuce leaves you buy at the grocery store – you can pick them directly from the plants. In a few weeks, when the plants are ripe, you will want to cut the whole lettuce from the ground. If you leave it in the field, it will eventually deteriorate.
Pick in the morning. They will be more crispy after staying overnight. If you pick them earlier, they will stay there.
Lettuce begins to “wither” under high temperature and moves towards the end of the growing season. It begins to seed and has a bitter taste. You can stop this by breaking the center of the plant. If the lettuce has not withered, pull it up directly.
Store the lettuce in the refrigerator. If you don’t eat lettuce right away, you can keep it in the refrigerator. If you wrap some paper towels in a plastic bag, it should last up to ten days.
