Harvesting winter lettuce

Start harvesting lettuce (picture by auntjojo)

Because lettuce thrives in the cool weather, we are blessed here in the bay to be able to grow any kind of lettuce our little hearts desire.

It takes some varieties little over a month to get from seed to your salad bowl. Many folks in the Bay Area are now harvesting their first crop of lettuce of the year.

There are a few ways to harvest lettuce:

1. Taking the outer leaves only. This nice thing about this type of harvesting is that the plant can continue to grow and you basically make salads straight from the bed. When you see a stem forming in the middle, the leaves will begin to taste bitter as the plant is beginning to bolt.
2. Harvest the entire lettuce head. You simply wait until the head is mature, but still on the young side and take the while head of lettuce.
3. The cut-and-come-again method. When most of the leaves have grown to the right size for salads, but them at about an inch above the soil. The plants will re-grow and you’ll get one or two more harvests out of that head.

Some varieties of lettuce that do well in the Bay Area are:

Looseleaf – ‘Black-seeded Simpson’, ‘Oakleaf’, ‘Red Oakleaf’, and ‘Salad Bowl’.
Romaine – ‘Diamond Head’, ‘Summertime’, ‘Rouge d’Hiver’, and ‘Little Gem’.
Butterhead – ‘Buttercrunch’, ‘Four Seasons’, ‘Bibb’, and ‘Continuity’.