Growing lettuce is not a bad way to start out growing your own food. The more popular supermarket iceberg lettuce can be a bit of a pain as it tends to bolt up to seed if you get a change in weather conditions just as it is getting to the point of harvest. And an early bolting lettuce is NOT one you want to save seed from (ironically enough)! But the iceberg lettuce is only one variety of one type of lettuce available.
Iceberg lettuce is part of the crisphead group, but there are also butterhead, cos and looseleaf lettuces. Looseleaf lettuces are good because they can be grown as a cut-and-come-again vegetable, which means you go back for a series of small harvests from a growing plant rather than harvesting the whole plant and then having to preserve it. We grow one butterhead (green mignonette) and one looseleaf (usually royal oak or lollo rosso), sowing one or two of each every two weeks.
If you leave a lettuce to its own devices, it will eventually send up a seed head, although crisphead types may need assistance by cutting the head open to allow the flower stalk to emerge. We find with our butterhead and looseleaf varieties, we harvest them for a while then allow them to send up a flower stalk. From the eating stage to seed harvest stage can take two months.
Lettuces are an easy crop to save seed from and are largely self-pollinating although there may be a small amount of cross pollination if varieties are grown side by side or if there are prickly lettuce (a wild lettuce ancestor) growing nearby. If you are only growing one lettuce variety at a time, stagger your plantings so that lettuce varieties set seed at different times, or keep a distance of 2 – 3 metres between varieties this problem will be considerably reduced.
We harvest the seed when two thirds of the flowers are showing the fluffy white calyx tissue on top of the seeds. You do have to keep an eye out as it is easy to go to your favoured seed plant(s) and find the seeds have matured and moved on while you were doing other things! In inclement weather, I have harvested the whole plant once most of the seeds are ripe and left it to hang upside down in the garage, from the rafters to dry out.
To harvest the seeds from the seed head, I rub the seed heads between my hands into a shallow bowl, which breaks the seed away from the calyx and seed heads. I then hold the bowl up to one side and blow along it, removing the light trash but leaving the heavier seeds behind. Once harvested I leave the seeds in the bowl or put them into a paper envelope for a few days to ensure that they are fullt dry, then pack them off (correctly labelled of course) into glass jars or small resealable plastic bags.
There is a world of lettuce varieties so give them a go and step outside the supermarket-iceberg-lettuce mould, and try growing new types of lettuces and then save their seeds to ensure your supply of lettuce into the future!
