Lettuce. Lactuca sativa.
Finding love in the garden. It's the green you can’t live without.
“Find the seed at the bottom of your heart and bring forth a flower.”
- Shigenori Kameoka
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Hello Everyone.
I spend far too much time thinking about lettuce on the summer solstice. It has little flavor, not much nutrition, and goes from perfection to bolting when summer heat settles in. But right now, the lettuce in my garden is stunningly beautiful despite the heat. I know it won’t last forever, but I’m always amazed at how lettuce brings beauty to my garden and requires little effort compared to other vegetables. There are no special tricks to growing lettuce, and there is no need for a plastic pot since it can be directly sown. Push the seed in the ground and wait a few weeks. Like magic, a complete meal instantly appears.
It helps to know the difference between butterhead, crisphead, romaine, and looseleaf type to grow good lettuce. I’m the type of gardener who chooses what to grow based on aesthetic qualities, and the color photos in a seed catalog make it easy to find love. Like finding a suitable partner on Match, there are plenty of options, and my decision is mainly based on what I don’t like, which is ordinary green leaf or red leaf.
I prefer lettuce with solid character and personality and a mix of colors to give the kitchen garden a painterly glow. I like a butterhead type with silky smooth, voluptuous leaves versus romaine. Butterhead gently unfolds in a circular pattern while romaine stands upright and rigid. Butterhead is best torn into a salad, while Romaine is chopped. Dressing a butterhead is done with a light hand, a simple EV olive oil, and vinegar, while Romaine requires a more assertive flavor to balance the crunchy texture.
Iceberg is a crisp head type named for the ice-filled containers used to ship it across the country. It doesn’t care about how it looks, tastes, or is treated: it can sit in the refrigerator's vegetable drawer and not even pretend to be alive. Slice it into wedges and serve it with a bold blue cheese dressing. Given all its flaws, it is still the best lettuce for your BLT or tuna sandwich.
Like many common garden plants, lettuce is derived from wild lettuce, a weed full of thorns known as milk thistle and deemed inedible. It came into cultivation 6000 years ago, harvested for the seeds pressed into oil. Leave it to the Egyptians to be the first to consider this plant worthy of a god, Min, the god of fertility, due to the erect seed head in the plant's center, which exudes a thick, milky sap in the stem. Min consumed wild lettuce as a sacred food for sexual stamina, while ordinary Egyptians used the oil for medicine and mummification.
When the Greeks learned to grow lettuce, they removed the thorns and consumed the leafy vegetable, considering it a sedative, not for everyday eating but for sleeping. In the story of Peter Rabbit, lettuce is also a soporific, which is how Peter ends up asleep in the watering can. In Greek mythology, Aphrodite’s lover Adonis was killed on a bed of lettuce by a boar sent by Artemis, who was envious of his hunting prowess, giving lettuce the mythic association with male impotence and death. Lettuce traveled into Western Europe and east to China, and when it reached Britain, women were afraid of overeating it and believed it could cause infertility.
There are nearly 2500 types of lettuce grown all over the world. Lettuce is a sunflower family member, a clan determined by a daisy-like flower that turns into the seed head. Each lettuce seed head produces 1500 seeds, an ample amount to save for next year’s garden (or to press for an exotic stimulating oil). It can be irresistibly beautiful when it peaks after about 45 days in the garden. A mature rosette of red butterhead or even an heirloom red iceberg, shown below, is so stunning that it could easily be substituted in a bridal bouquet for a clutch of roses.
Lettuce is one of the few garden crops you can grow year-round at any time. While most of the lettuce I am harvesting this week was sown weeks ago, another successive crop is coming. In Peter Hatch’s book A Rich Spot of Earth, I learned that Thomas Jefferson sowed a thimbleful of lettuce every Monday morning, the only way to a continuous crop. If you live in a hot climate, lettuce seed won’t germinate above 82 degrees, but you can start it in the shade or indoors and transplant it into the garden. Lettuce is remarkably resilient and adaptable, far more than most gardeners know. Some types are best suited for winter greenhouse growing, while others are bred for early spring and hot summer.
Favorites include Little Gem, Blushed Oak Leaf, Deer Tongue, Mescher, Blushed Butter Cos, Flashy Trout Back, and Reine d’Glaces. Heirloom lettuce seeds can be found at Wild Garden Seeds and Fruition Seeds.
The secret to growing good lettuce is to grow it fast; if it slows down, the flavor will suffer. If it is in the ground too long, it will rot. If it is too hot, it will turn bitter. While gardeners can’t control the weather or how a plant responds in a heat wave or a drought, we can offer protection from rain or freezing temperatures. A succession of lettuce plantings allows for any lost time, creating a new tapestry of greenery every few weeks.
You might even get lucky because lettuce often thrives independently with little effort, especially in spring and fall. For this reason alone, lettuce is easy to love. When you give it what it likes, it responds favorably. Lettuce might taste like nothing, yet we can’t live without it. Get to know your favorites and keep them planted all summer long. Happy Solstice!
From my garden to yours,
Ellen O.
Ellen Ecker Ogden is the author of The New Heirloom Garden, The Complete Kitchen Garden, and other books on kitchen garden design with recipes. She’s currently writing a new book of essays titled Love and Arugula.
