How to grow lettuces

Lettuce is a fast, cool-season leafy crop that fills the gap at the start and end of the growing season, when little else in the bed is ready to eat. Home gardeners grow it for the quick turnaround from seed to salad and for the range of textures and colors available, from loose-leaf rosettes to firm, wrapped heads. It occupies a bed for only a matter of weeks, a natural fit for succession sowing between longer-season crops, with a spring planting followed by a second sowing once fall weather arrives.

The hardest part of growing lettuce well is timing it around heat. University of Minnesota Extension notes that multiple days above 75 degrees push the plant to bolt, turning the leaves tough and bitter as it sends up a flower stalk. A second-year gardener who grew a spring crop successfully the year before often leaves it in the ground a week too long, assuming a few warm days will pass without consequence. By the time the seed stalk is visible, the sugars have already turned bitter, and the fix is to cut at the first sign of bolting, not to wait and see.