Direct Seeding Lettuce in the Garden and How to Thin Lettuce Seedlings: By Picking the First Salad of the Season!

Baby Tom Thumb Lettuce in the Greenhouse

Back on February 20th, I scattered a spot about two feet square with Tom Thumb lettuce seeds leftover from 2008, sprinkled a thin layer of compost over them, and watered well. Because lettuce seeds don't seem to keep well for me, I sowed them more thickly than I normally would. Next to it, I scattered the rest of a packet of 2008 Winter Lettuce Mix in about the same size area.

On the other side of the Tom Thumb I direct seeded a small patch of mache (corn salad), which is one of the most (if not the most) cold tolerant salad greens you can grow. I've had volunteer mache sprout up in the greenhouse in the middle of winter. I figured I was probably pushing my luck planting in the greenhouse in late February, though, because mache doesn't like the heat, and it will quickly warm up to 100 degrees in there when the sun is shining. No matter—the 2008 seeds were a no show anyway. I've ordered more and will try again in the fall, probably sowing half the seeds in the greenhouse and half outside in a raised bed. I adore mache's nutty flavor and delicate rosettes of leaves.

I had much better luck with the lettuce seeds. It was a slow start sprouting (as of the February 28th snowstorm there was no sign of anything coming up yet), but that wasn't surprising given how cold the soil was. A lot of times you're actually better off planting early spring crops like peas a week or two later than you think you should because they'll sprout faster and then catch right up to the earlier planted seeds, which is very good news for gardeners like me who are perpetually behind with everything. This is probably what happened with the lettuce.

As you can see, the Tom Thumb lettuce came up nice and thick, and on April 6th I picked enough tender baby plants to make a small, simple salad. It was wonderful. I'm a sucker for any butterhead variety, and while I've grown this type before, some quick fact checking in my seed catalogs has made me realize that I need to give it a little extra attention this year to find out just what this stuff does when given the space.

Pinetree Garden Seeds (where these seeds are from) says that Tom Thumb (47 days) "actually produces a full butterhead in a relatively short period of time. Six to seven inch heads have firm structure and compact habit. Leaves are dark green and the entire head wil make a large salad for one." This year Pinetree started labeling all of their heirloom varieties, but Tom Thumb isn't marked as one.

The Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog, however, describes Tom Thumb as an heirloom lettuce that dates back to the 1850s and "makes small cabbage-like green heads, only 3" to 4" across." They say it's very tasty and "a winner for classy markets!"

I don't recall the leaves ever being particularly dark green, but maybe I just never paid attention. And now I'm curious about the size. In order for these plants to form those soft butterheads and reach maturity, though, they'll need a lot more space. Instead of thinning out lettuce plants when they've barely sprouted, I wait until they're big enough to eat. Then I pull some of plants up, gently tearing off the roots as I go, which means no dirt in the kitchen and tasty snacks for our foodie chickens—which have been multiplying for spring.

This gives the remaining plants some elbow room, which they quickly grow into. Two days after that first picking I took the photo above, and you can hardly tell we've already started eating the spring lettuce crop. A week later it was time to harvest again.


Great Greens in the Greenhouse, Including an Overwintered Swiss Chard Plant

The Winter Lettuce Mix, also from Pinetree Garden seeds, is to the right of the Tom Thumb in the photo above and is looking pretty good, too. I think we'll thin a little bit of it for tonight's dinner.

Are you enjoying spring salads yet? And have you ever grown Tom Thumb lettuce?

Related posts:
How To Easily Grow Your Own Gourmet Lettuce From Seed
Sublime Salads for Those Short on Time, Space, and Sunlight
On Loving Lettuce & Eating Salad for Breakfast
5/24/06: Mixed Baby Lettuce in the Garden & Eating Local
11/13/06: Petite Rouge Heirloom Lettuce in the Garden
5/8/07: Big Boston Lettuce in the Greenhouse

© Copyright 2009 FarmgirlFare.com, the going green foodie farm blog where we're looking forward to hopefully being able to enjoy freshly picked lettuce three times a day in the next month—because overindulging in spring is the only way to survive the hot summer and early fall without any!

How To Grow Your Own Gourmet Lettuce From Seed - It's Easier Than You Think!

Jericho Lettuce In My Garden On May 8th

Looking for lettuce growing tips? You'll find even more in my post, Lettuce and Arugula in the Garden, with Step-by-Step Photos Showing How To Grow Arugula from Seed in Less than a Month. Happy growing!

I don't think about salad the same way normal people do. I've even started eating it for breakfast. You can read more about this obsession on my food and farm blog, Farmgirl Fare, in a post called On Loving Lettuce.

Lettuce was one of the few things I managed to plant on time this year, and am I glad I did. It's an iffy spring crop in southern Missouri. We usually have at least a few days in the 90s in April—which in itself can be enough to ruin your crop—and it's always a toss up as to whether May will behave itself and stay mild or jump headfirst into summer. This year it behaved, and I harvested gorgeous lettuce every day for weeks.

Today I enjoyed the last of my stash in the fridge, and my salads will now be lettuceless at least until early fall. But if you live in a place where summers are mild (oh how I envy you!), it's not too late to plant, and growing your own lettuce from seed is easier than you might think.


Merveille de Quatre Saisons Lettuce on May 8th

You can tuck a little lettuce almost anywhere, even in spots that are mostly shaded. The only pests that touch the lettuce in my organic kitchen garden are ravaging rabbits. If slugs or snails are a problem in your area, a sprinkling of diatomaceous earth on and around the plants should take care of them.

Diatomaceous earth is an all-natural pesticide made of finely ground fossils of prehistoric freshwater diatoms and can be used indoors and out to kill all kinds of creeping and crawling insects. We buy food grade diatomaceous earth in 50-pound bags and feed it to our livestock (and even the dogs) as a natural wormer.

Don’t have a 'real' garden? Lettuce will happily grow in containers, and since it doesn’t require two feet of soil depth, something short and wide is ideal, such as a plastic dish tub or one of the large plastic bus tubs restaurants use to hold dirty dishes.

For years my lettuce planting schedule went like this: start numerous little flats of seeds in mid-winter, only get around to transplanting a small fraction of the tiny seedlings into individual plugs, then only get around to transplanting a small fraction of those into the garden.

I now take a much lazier approach—and end up with a much bigger harvest.

Simply scatter your seeds onto some nice dirt (compost and manure are excellent soil amendments), then sprinkle them with a light layer of soil or compost, barely covering them. Water well, then sit back and wait, daydreaming of the beautiful bounty you are bringing to life.



You can begin harvesting after only a few weeks—just snip what you need with scissors and leave the plants to continue growing. What I've started doing is sowing the seeds very thickly (which virtually eliminates weeds), then as soon as the plants have a few bite-sized leaves I start to thin them out. And I just keep thinning.

I reach in, pluck out a few of the crowded plants from several different spots, and I swear by the next day the remaining plants have already taken over the empty spaces. You can see in this photo how big the plants with more space have already become.


Newly Planted Lettuce Bed On March 21st

One of the best things about growing lettuce from seed is that there are dozens of varieties available. While the phrase 'picture pefect' rarely applies to my garden unless I’m daydreaming, I did do some aesthetically pleasing, taste-test planting this year.

I divided a 4' x 8' raised bed into eight squares and planted a different type of heat tolerant, slow-to-bolt lettuce in each. I separated the squares with rows of French Breakfast and Easter Egg radishes, which are easy to grow and ready in under a month—just be sure to thin the young seedlings so the rest will have enough room to mature.



Apart from the Red Deer's Tongue, a loose head bib type variety believed to have originated in the mid 16th century, that was a no-show, my experiment was an eye-pleasing, tasty success. The other varieties I planted were Buttercrunch, which I adore; Gentilina, an Italian variety with bright green, frizzled, leafy heads; Jericho, a crisp, sweet cos type bred for the deserts of Israel and pictured at the top of this post; New Red Fire, which has deep red frilly leaves and is extremely slow to bolt; Merveille de Quatre Saisons, a reddish green bibb type; Tom Thumb, which produces a 6" to 7" dark green butterhead in 47 days; and Winter Density, a compact 8" Romaine with thick dark green leaves full of flavor.

Can’t make up your mind which kind of lettuce to plant? Packets of salad mixes are the way to go. I’ve been growing the Rocky Top Lettuce Blend from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds for years.



Pictured here is a 4' x 8' raised bed of Baker Creek’s European Mesclun Mix I planted in late March that went gangbusters (the closeup photo further up is of this same bed). The Baker Creek catalog says this colorful mix, which includes lettuce, radicchio, arugula, endive, orach, mizuna, kale, mustard, and corn salad, is a favorite with market growers and has flavors that range from sweet-mild to sour-hot-tangy. Talk about some truly gorgeous salads.

Another easy to grow from seed heirloom variety of lettuce I like is Freckles, which you can read more about here.

The main thing to remember when growing lettuce is that heat is its bitter enemy— literally. Even a few days in the upper 80s or 90s can have your whole crop tasting terrible. This is very, very depressing.

A partly shaded garden spot is best. The next best thing is to create some comfortable shade for your plants. If the thermometer reads 90 degrees in the shade, it'll feel a whole lot hotter than if you're standing in the sun for eight hours. You can learn more about how I create garden shade in Gardening on the Cheap: How To Quickly and Easily Shade Lettuce and Other Plants and Why You Should.

If you’re growing in containers, you can move them in and out of the sun. Put large, heavy pots on wheeled bases for effortless rearranging—a trick I learned from my friend Cookiecrumb, who successfully grows containers of tomatoes on a small condo patio by rolling them into the sun.

On the other end of the thermometer, lettuce is quite cold hardy and can survive light frosts. I’ve had uncovered lettuce subjected to 24 degrees, and it thawed out just fine once the sun hit it. Floating row cover is wonderful stuff that will give you about 5 degrees of protection, while still allowing light and rain to penetrate. If you treat it well, it can last for years. An old bedsheet draped over your plants is another easy way to protect them.

So what are you waiting for? Sow some seeds today, and you’ll be harvesting glorious green bounty in less than a month. Just make sure you plant enough—I’m sure I can’t be the only lettuce overeater out there.

More posts about some of my favorite things to grow:

Freckles Lettuce: Another Easy To Grow from Seed Heirloom Favorite

Favorite Heirloom Tomatoes to Grow—Mine and Yours

Growing Onions in the Garden

Growing Onions from Purchased Plants—Ordering and Planning

Growing Short Day Onion Varieties from Purchased Plants

Harvesting Spring Onions Grown from Purchased Plants

Endive and Escarole in the Kitchen and Garden

Growing Lemon Cucumbers from Seed

Miniature White Cucumbers: An Easy To Grow Favorite from Seed

How to Grow Beets from Seed (and here's my favorite beet recipe)

How To Grow Swiss Chard from Seed and Why You Should (and recipes)

How To Grow Arugula from Seed in Less than a Month

How To Grow Nero di Toscana Cabbage (also called Tuscan Kale, Cavalo Nero, Lacinato Kale, Dinosaur Kale) from Seed and What to Do with It

How To Grow Asian Greens for Fall by Direct Seeding

My Favorite Heirloom Carrots (so far) to Grow from Seed: Parisienne

Tips for Growing & Using Rosemary Year Round

Related articles & resources:

—Gardening On The Cheap: Shading Lettuce & Other Crops

—The Great Compost Cover Up

—The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, 10th Anniversary Edition by Ed Smith. This has been my favorite gardening book for the past 7 11 years, and I highly recommend it for kitchen gardeners of all levels, especially beginners. It's full of wonderful tips and is always the first book I turn to when I have a garden question.

—Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, a wonderful family owned company located here in Missouri, sells over two dozen varieties of lettuce in packets of 700 seeds for $1.25 to $1.50 each. Salad blend packets contain 1,200 seeds and cost $2.50. I’ve been buying seeds from them for years. They offer over 1,000 types of non-hybrid, non-GMO, non-treated, non-patented and often very rare seeds from all over the world.

—Pinetree Garden Seeds in Maine is another company I’ve been ordering from for years. They specialize in smaller packets of seeds for the backyard gardener and offer many varieties of lettuce seeds, including a few of their own special mixes. Packets of 500 seeds sell for just 65 to 95 cents each. They also sell all kinds of reasonably priced garden & kitchen tools and gadgets.

© 2007 FarmgirlFare.com, the dirty handed foodie farm blog where Farmgirl Susan shares photos & stories of her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres.

Lettuce and Arugula in the Garden, with Step-by-Step Photos Showing How To Grow Arugula from Seed in Less than a Month

Sublime Homegrown Salad Greens for Those Short on Time, Space, and Sunlight

Love lettuce? You might find my post How To Grow Your Own Gourmet Lettuce from Seed: It's Easier than You Think! helpful. And there are links to lots more favorite things to grow at the bottom of this post.

Got a bumper arugula crop? Make some Arugula Pesto or try this easy, all-purpose Arugula Cottage Cheese Dip/Spread/Sauce.

Arugula is so easy to grow I didn't even plant this.

Really. This is what you get when you grow some arugula in the greenhouse, let it flower and go to seed, and then, months later, finally pull up the dried out stalks and plunk them down on an unused patch of bed on the other side of the greenhouse.

Ignore them all winter, then toss the stalks into the compost bin because all of the seeds have dropped out of them. Realize where the seeds have landed, and wonder if a little water might just sprout something. Lo and behold—an arugula jungle! A little more about arugula below. But first, here are some photos to show you just how quickly you can grow yourself some salad. The photo above was taken on April 27th.

Gardening On The Cheap: How to Quickly and Easily Shade Lettuce and Other Plants and Why You Should

Heat is the bitter enemy of lettuce.

Want to grow your own lettuce? Check out How To Grow Your Own Gourmet Lettuce from Seed - It's Easier than You Think!

Our weather is unpredictable year round—and from each year to the next—but one thing is certain: there is always at least one heat wave in April. A few days in the upper 90s are not uncommon. With soaring temperatures (88F Wednesday, 91°F yesterday) and more predicted through the week, I realized it was already time to shade the lettuce bed.

Just a few days of extreme heat can transform your entire crop of lovely lettuce into bitter greens—and send it bolting skyward with nothing but seed making on its mind.

Even a little bit of shade can make a big difference for nearly all plants. Full sun is harsh. If the thermometer reads 90°, a plant or person standing out in the sun for any period of time is going to feel much hotter than that.

Even heat tolerant, sun loving plants like tomatoes and peppers can do with some time in the shade. Most plants that need 'full sun' only require 6 hours of sunlight a day. If they're getting more like 12, they can easily become stressed

Several years ago I read about a couple who had quit their jobs at a large newspaper, moved to the country, and created a wildly successful small farm business. They sold their bounty at a farmers' market and through weekly subscriptions (conveniently to all of their former colleagues—one delivery stop and they were done).

One of their most popular crops was basil, which does just fine in the heat. So when this couple spent $1,400 constructing a greenhouse solely to house their summer basil plantings, people thought they were nuts—until they saw the results. The greenhouse basil was bigger, healthier, and tastier than what they had been growing in direct sunlight.

Soon I'll be tying an inexpensive, blue plastic tarp over the top of my greenhouse to keep the interior temperature down. Click here to see a photo. I also keep the door open and back side vented. Even with the tarp on, plenty of light still reaches the plants.

The raspberry canes growing on the south side also create shade and help cool things down. Some people roll up the sides of their greenhouse plastic in summer so the air can flow through, which is what I plan to do with my next greenhouse. Others remove it entirely and replace it with shade cloth.

But back to the lettuce, which I don't plant in the greenhouse in spring because even now it's already too warm in there. Creating indirect light for your plants using a greenhouse, shade cloth, or by simply growing them in a partly shaded spot can make all the difference. Just think of how well everything grows in mostly cloudly places like England and the Pacific Northwest. Cooling down your heat hating lettuce can literally save or extend your crop.

You can buy fairly inexpensive rolls of weather resistant shade cloth in garden centers and nurseries or by mail order. Or you can poke around the house/garage/basement/neighbor's yard and see what you already have hanging around.

Old bedsheets (check thrift stores and yard sales) offer many of uses in the garden, including as shade makers. Clip them (clothespins work) to bamboo stakes (or old broomsticks or your kids' hockey sticks or whatever you can find) stuck into the ground around your plot. Just remember to take them down if it rains.

My 'shade cloth' in this photo consists of two strange curtains I found stashed in an old storage box. They still let in a fair amount of sunlight, but they also allow the rain to reach the plants so I can just leave them up all the time. And after three years out in the blazing sun, they haven't begun to disintegrate, which is a bit frightening actually.

The obnoxiously bright but easy to spot plastic clips were purchased at a discount store on a whim and have come in very handy around the garden.

For more information about the mini greenhouse frame on this lettuce plot, please see the comments section in this previous post.

One more tip to please your plants:
Regular watering during hot days is, of course, essential, especially if you're growing in containers. Raised beds also dry out faster than regular garden beds. Supposedly by the time a plant shows signs of wilting, it is already in extreme distress.


Note: Unless you live in the Southern U.S. or other warm climate, it's not too late to get a little gourmet salad garden going. Check out my post, How To Grow Your Own Gourmet Lettuce from Seed - It's Easier than You Think!, for inspiration and tips.

© FarmgirlFare.com