Racing the Sun To Get Lettuce Planting Done

I consult the LSU AgCenter Vegetable Planting Guide to let me know when to plant items in our growing zone, how deep to plant the seeds and how far apart to space them.  As I was perusing the Planting Guide, I realized that September 30th is the last date recommended for planting lettuce in our area.  So when I got home from work on September 29th, I got my rear end in gear.  I had a 15 foot long row all worked up and weed-free.  Its 30 inch width was perfect in allowing me to plant seeds in three furrows I made across the top of the row in which to place the tiny lettuce seeds.  You can see the furrows below if you look closely.

Furrows in the Lettuce Row - ready for planting

Let's talk a little bit about lettuce.  I like salads.  I like to add different toppings and vegetables and a nice vinaigrette dressing on top.  Let's be honest, though.  Salads aren't filling.  Will they help you to survive in very difficult times when food is short?  Hmmm, probably not.  In survival cases, your garden better contain root crops like potatoes, carrots and the like that contain more calories and nutrition than lettuce.  But for non-apocalyptic times, a fresh garden salad is a nice complement to a meal.

I have five different varieties of lettuce that I'm planting on our lettuce row:

• Red Romaine
• Black Seeded Simpson,
• Red Wing Lettuce Mix
• Oak Leaf Lettuce, and
• Rocky Top Mix

I've alternated plantings into five separate blocks, separated on the row and alternating red and green coloring of the lettuce.  It ought to be pretty once it is up and growing.  I like to plant things that not only taste good, but that look good while growing.

Five different types of Lettuce

I learned a couple things last year about lettuce that I'll put into practice again this fall/winter.  In previous years, I would pull up the lettuce by the roots, harvesting the entire plant in order to make a salad.  I realized that this was very wasteful. Rather than do that, I started just pinching off leaves I wanted to eat.  This allowed me to have a nice mix of different types of lettuce in my salad and the lettuce will continue growing and putting on more leaves that we could eat.  In short, by doing this, your lettuce will yield more per square foot.  Also, by leaving the roots in the ground at the end of the growing season, the soil is loosened and  broken up by the growing action of the roots.

Another thing I did was I covered the lettuce with a tarpaulin overnight on nights that we had freezes, weighing down the tarp with landscape timbers to keep them from blowing off of the lettuce. By doing this we were able to enjoy fresh salads even deep into the winter, without experiencing frost damage or plant death.  As the temperatures rose above freezing during the day, I would pull the tarp off the lettuce and let it continue growing in the sunshine.

Lettuce seed is very small and lightweight.  You only need to cover it with 1/8 inch soil.  I first tried the Red Romaine Lettuce variety last year, when it came as a free item with my seed order from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  This is what the Red Romaine lettuce seed looks like:

Red Romaine Lettuce seed

Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce is a variety that I've been growing for years.  It produces a nice bunch of lettuce and its bright green growth contrasts with the dark green leaves of surrounding broccoli and cauliflower.  I have better success growing lettuce in the fall and winter than I do in the spring.  It just gets hot too fast here in the south.  As a result, the lettuces bolts to seed and gets bitter-tasting very quickly. I've found that a fall planting alleviates that problem.  You can see why this lettuce is called, "Black Seeded" Simpson as you compare the picture above to the picture below.

Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce

Red Wing Lettuce Blend is a new variety I'm trying this year.  Since it is a mix, you'll note the seeds are different.

Red Wing Lettuce Mix

This is a photo of a harvested bunch of leaves from the Red Wing Lettuce mix that I found online. That will make a nice looking salad, don't you think?

Image Credit

If you look at the first photo in this blog post, you will see that the sun was higher in the sky.  As I seeded the lettuce, I became aware that the sun was dipping in the western horizon at a quick pace, and that encouraged me to hurry it up with the task at hand.  I got all the lettuce planted, covered and then lightly watered the row, simulating a rainfall.

Lettuce Row Planted

Once the lettuce is up, I'll figure out a more aesthetic way of marking the different varieties of lettuce.

Fresh Carrots from the Garden!

Our carrots are coming in right now.  It seems every year as our soil gets more healthy, the carrot crop gets better.  I love the lush, green growth of the carrot tops. We harvest the carrots, wash them up real good, and either eat them fresh, blanch and freeze them, or can them so that we can enjoy them year round.  It just so happens that we ate our last bag of frozen blanched carrots from last year's crop, so the ripening carrots from this year's crop are just in time.

Green is my favorite color

We grow four different types of carrots in our garden: Parisienne Carrots, Atomic Red Carrots, Cosmic Purple Carrots, and Berlicum Carrots.  Here is a shot of carrots from each of the above mentioned varieties except for Atomic Red.  The Atomic Red Carrots, for some reason, are not quite ready yet.  I'm going to allow them to grow for a month more.

Colorful Carrots

Here are the Berlicum Carrots.  They are a normal orange carrot that grows to be a nice size and resembles your typical carrot.

Berlicum Carrots

These are the Cosmic Purple Carrots.  They grow a little fatter than the others.  The Purple coloration is just the outside skin, though.  Once you cut them, the internal portion is orange.  

Cosmic Purple Carrots

These are Parisienne Carrots.  They grow in little balls that are sized about the size of a Ping Pong ball and are good cooked in stews or soups.

Parisienne Carrots

Here is a sampling of each type of carrot, with a couple of radishes I pulled thrown in for good measure. Since the Atomic Red Carrots aren't ripe yet, I wanted something red to take its place.

Nice colorful root vegetables

A nice vegetable tableau:

Root Vegetables

Some of the carrots I pull will come up with lots of dirt on them.  So that I don't remove any topsoil from the garden, I'll generally wash them in the garden first and throw the muddy water back in the garden.  Then I'll wash them a little better inside, because we don't peel the skins off of them before we eat them.  We'll slice them and steam them or cook them in other dishes as is.  Regardless of the color, they all taste like carrots.

Rinsed and Ready

Tonight I pulled a nice head of Oak Leaf Lettuce along with the carrots.

Oak Leaf Lettuce

The lettuce accompanied with sliced radishes, criolla sella peppers and satsumas made a delicious salad.

When it comes time for putting some of the carrots away, we'll show you the various ways we do it.   I'll also show you what the Atomic Red Carrots look like.