My Tiny Plot

The Lettuce in my coldframe are romping away. All this mild weather has confused them and encouraged them to put on a growth spurt. But I don’t want them to get too big just now.

Hopefully the weather will settle down a bit into a more wintry pattern and they will slow down a bit. I want nice large heads in Spring next year not salad ready in time for Christmas!

Here are my smart new Lettuce varieties that I’m growing for the first time this year. Above is Reine de Glaces, an iceberg type, crispy sort with spiky leaves. Very fresh.

This one is called Really Red and is not quite big enough to cut yet as it needs to heart up a bit more. But when it does…

This one is my favourite, it’s called Flashy Butter Oak. What a great name? I particularly like the red flecks that look great against the one-colour Lettuces.

I also tried another new variety called Red Iceberg, but unfortunately all of the seedlings succumbed to damping off and keeled over. I’ve resowed in the open ground but the plants are still very small. But hopefully I’ll get to taste one this year.

One of my favourite Lettuces to grow is Tom Thumb. It’s a butterhead type with nice tight, bright green leaves and it tastes lovely with a good mustardy dressing. One of the reasons I like it so much, apart from the taste, is that it looks so neat in the garden!

Some of the Lettuces I grow are, to be honest, a bit floppy like Marvel of the Four Seasons, and a new one I tried this year, Drunken Woman (I don’t know why it’s called that either). And then your common or garden varieties like Oakleaf can get very big very quickly and take over the garden.

With Tom Thumb, they stay quite small (so you need to grow a lot of them) but they also stay where you planted them, in a neat row. I like that. At this time of year it’s my little piece of sanity in a garden gone mad.

This is a photo of one of my Tom Thumb lettuces. For me, Lettuce is the backbone of any kitchen garden. It’s such a versatile crop, and it can make the difference between a lackluster, patchy garden and an oasis of wow-ness (I made that word up, can you tell?).

Firstly, it’s super easy to grow. My goodness, I could launch some seeds from the deck and I’d be picking lettuce in 4 – 6 weeks. Honestly. Secondly, the variety of different shapes, sizes, tastes, and colours of the leaves is astounding. Do you want crunchy or melt in the mouth buttery? Do you want mild or sharp, or bitter? You could easily grow nothing but Lettuce in your garden and not get bored of it, ever.

But thirdly, and this is the reason I get so excited about Lettuce, is that it’s the one plant that will make or break your garden’s design. And for me, after taste, design comes a close second.

I sow some Lettuce as early as I can to ensure I get the longest season possible. All I have is a coldframe so I usually sow some in there to begin with and then move to a prepared seedbed outside once the weather warms up.

I pick a small patch of the garden (only a metre square) and sow lots of different varieties in succession (a few every week). Once the seedlings get to the four or five leaf stage I will transplant them to their final growing position. Above is a photo of my Oakleaf seedbed.

This is where it starts to get exciting. Because if I’ve done it right then I should have lots of different shapes and colours to choose from. So I can start to make pretty rows of contrasting shades which, once they start to heart up, will really start to give mtp that kitchen garden / potager look.

You have to be on your toes though. This is not a sow once and forget it project. No, you need to keep up the supply of seedlings – which means keeping up with the sowing. Because, once you harvest your first Lettuce, that’s it, you’ve ruined the design. But not, (aha!) if you have some seedlings ready to plant into the gap. Or… better still, if you have already planted some seedlings inbetween your larger Lettuce in anticipation of them being harvested. Sneaky!

Once, you’ve got a steady stream of Lettuce coming in, all you have to worry about is eating it. Which is never a problem, I’m sure. One of my favourites is Merveille des Quatre Saisons – so soft and fluffy! What varieties of Lettuce do you grow? Can you suggest any unusual ones that taste amazing?

I counted the lettuce today and we have seventy-nine. Well actually seventy-seven after today because we ate two at a ’4th of July’ bar-b-que. Some would say that’s too many (like my Dad) but I’m not so sure. They’re not all the same variety. Around 40 of them are Little Gem in varying degrees of growth, 20 are Pentard Red curly lettuce and the rest are Webb’s Wonder iceberg affairs. We like lettuce and if we find we don’t like it ‘that’ much then we know some other people who do.
I find lettuce really easy to grow. All mine are from seed, sown directly in the ground and when they get to an inch or so long I space them out to around three or four inches apart in rows, depending on their variety. I haven’t had any major problems with slugs up to now (which maybe explains my success) and they seem quite happy even in the hot weather we’ve been having lately. Now all I need is for my cherry tomatoes and cucumbers to catch up so that we can have a ‘proper’ salad.

This week has been pretty slow on mtp. Apart from the fact that Ryan and I were away this weekend on ‘bonafide’ minibreak in Stratford (and to watch this- it was amazing). The main reason is the weather, it’s so unpredicatable. Tonight I had planned to spend some time at the plot watering, weeding and sowing but the torrent of rain stopped me leaving the house. Instead, I have to be content with looking at pictures of my lettuce which are growing nicely. I had seven or eight germinate in a glump (I mean clump obviously!) and so carefully broke them apart and replanted them a few inches from each other in a neat line. The Snowball turnips have germinated (it seems) over night and the gooseberries are getting fatter each day.
I had a minor disaster with some small aubergine plants though. I put them out before I went to work to harden off (planning to take them in tonight) and by the time I got home they were all dead! Rats… Good job I have some more to replace them with. Next week will be more productive. It has to be otherwise we won’t have any veg come July!