Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Last call for bare root fruit trees. This is the most economical way to plant an orchard, so choose your trees now.

• Potatoes can be planted this month. Plant red, white, yellow and russet for a variety of uses and flavors.

• Mouth-watering strawberries should be planted now for delicious berries this summer. Plant them in a sunny, well-drained bed.

• For blue hydrangeas, apply aluminum sulfate around the plants this month. It’s also time to prune hydrangeas by removing old flower heads down to the first new leaves. Don’t prune stems which have no old flowers, and they will bloom first this summer.

Grow your own lettuce

An ever-expanding selection of lettuce varieties are available to home gardeners, adding variety, texture and color to the salad bowl.

Lettuce varieties can be divided into four groups: crisphead, butterhead, leaf and romaine. Each group has its own growth and taste characteristics.

Crisphead lettuce is probably the most familiar. It makes a tight, firm head of crisp, light-green leaves. In general, crisphead lettuce is not tolerant of hot weather, and bolts readily under hot summer conditions. For this reason, plus the long growing period required, it is the most difficult of the lettuces to grow in the home garden.

The butterhead types, also called Boston or bibb lettuce, have smaller, softer heads of loosely folded leaves. The outer leaves may be green or reddish with cream-colored inner leaves that have a buttery flavor. Buttercos varieties grow upright like a romaine but have a heart like a butterhead and waxy leaves.

Leaf lettuce has an open growth habit and does not form a tight head. Some cultivars are frilled and crinkled and others deeply lobed. Color ranges from light green to red and bronze. Leaf lettuce matures quickly and is the easiest to grow.

Romaine or cos lettuces form upright, cylindrical heads of tightly folded leaves. The plants may reach up to 10 inches in height. The outer leaves are medium green with greenish white inner leaves.

Lettuce is a cool-season vegetable and develops best quality when grown under cool, moist conditions. Lettuce seedlings will tolerate a light frost and do they best in spring and fall. Seeds of lettuce can be planted early in the spring or transplants can be set out starting in early March.

In the summer, lettuce prefers to get it’s sun in the morning and late afternoon, rather than the hottest midday sun, so you can plant it in the shade of taller plants.

Lettuce can be grown in a wide range of soils, but loose, fertile, sandy loam soils, with plenty of organic matter are best. Till in well-rotted manure or compost and top dress with alfalfa meal. The soil should be well-drained and moist, but not soggy.

Several successive plantings of lettuce will provide a continuous harvest throughout the growing season. You can set out plants and start seeds at the same time to get a jump on the season now. Space plants of leaf lettuce nine inches apart and head lettuce plants 12 inches apart.

All lettuce types should be harvested when full size but young and tender. Leaf lettuce, butterhead, buttercos or romaine types may be harvested by removing the outer leaves, or cutting the plant about an inch above the soil surface. A second harvest is often possible this way. Crisphead lettuce is picked when the center is firm.

Start your lettuce patch now and enjoy delicious fresh lettuce straight from your garden.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 10:10 am and is filed under Garden Article, Willits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.