Lettuce from your own garden impresses with its crisp freshness and contains significantly more nutrients than that from the supermarket. Find out below how to plant and care for lettuce in your own garden.
How to successfully grow lettuce in the garden?
To plant and care for lettuce in your own garden, you should plant it in full sun, enrich the soil with compost, water regularly, ensure sufficient planting distance and, if necessary, control pests.
The lettuce in the profile
- Botanical name: Lactuca sativa var. capitata L.
- Varieties: around 30 different ones available in Germany
- Development time: 60 to 120 days
- Location: full sun
- Shape: firm, rounded head
- Leaves: Mostly light green, some varieties reddish
- Flower: Asteraceae, aster-like, yellow or violet
- Winter hardiness: there are winter-hardy varieties
Prefer lettuce
If you want to harvest lettuce as early as possible, you can start harvesting it at home from the end of January. The lettuce germinates best at temperatures between 15 and 20 degrees, so it is advisable to place it on the windowsill of a cooler room. Do not plant more than two seeds per seed tray so that you can prick them out easily later. Below are instructions for successful cultivation:
- Place the seeds 0.5cm deep in the soil and cover them lightly.
- Water thoroughly and make sure that the substrate never dries out over the next few days and weeks.
- Place your seed trays in a bright, draft-free location at around 18°C.
- If the ground frost is no longer expected, you can plant your lettuce outdoors.
The ideal location for lettuce
Lettuce should be kept as sunny as possible. Not only does it thrive faster and more vigorously in the sun, the nitrate content also drops. Lettuce also likes loose, humus-rich soil. Therefore, before planting or sowing, you should dig up the soil and add a generous portion of compost underneath.
Sowing or planting lettuce outdoors
So that the lettuce has enough space to grow, you should maintain a planting distance of at least 25cm, or 30cm for large varieties. If you want to save yourself pricking out, you can also maintain this planting distance when direct sowing. Otherwise, prick out as soon as the plants are a few centimeters tall. You can find out more about the ideal planting distance and advantageous planting neighbors here.
Care for lettuce in the garden
Ensure sufficient watering, especially immediately after sowing or planting out; But lettuce should also be watered regularly later on. Fertilizing is not necessary, but if you feel like your lettuce is lacking nutrients, you can treat it to some compost. If you have grown late varieties, you should protect the lettuce heads from frost with a fleece during the colder season.
Pests that threaten lettuce
Snails love salad. Unfortunately, this is not a cliché, but reality. If you are struggling with snails in your garden, it may make sense to put up a snail fence (€89.00 on Amazon) or something similar. Growing in raised beds also prevents snail infestation. Aphids also like lettuce. These can be combated in an environmentally friendly way with nettle broth.
Harvesting lettuce
As soon as the lettuce has reached the desired size, it should be harvested. Depending on the variety, the harvest time is 60 to 120 days after sowing. Here you will find an overview of the most important varieties and their sowing and harvest dates.