so one of the first things I learned how to grow was lettuce and I have been growing it and for about eight years now from seed and today I grow it indoors but I showed you that video about a few months ago and I'll leave a link at the end of this video if you'd like to check it out if you missed it I grow it indoors all year long and you can also grow it without grow lights indoors so I'll leave a link to that video as well but today I just want to concentrate on how you can get it growing outdoors wherever you live I have grown it in sunny Florida and I'm also growing it here in the Western North Carolina mountains so all of this video footage I recorded from my personal gardens over the past eight years with the exception of one or two pictures in here and I noted those for you and so what we'll do is just take a closer look at why you may want to grow this and I'll take a look at how to plant it this will include picking out your seed and the different varieties and you may also have some problems so we'll look at those along with how to water and feed it how to harvest it and ways that you can use it in a kitchen so I've been reviewing this little study for you it includes 47 fruits and vegetables and they are ranked by nutrient density and of course lettuce is on here and the nutrient density does vary with the different types of lettuce that you grow the first and most nutritious would be leaf lettuce and then we have romaine lettuce and then the last one being iceberg lettuce so I'll leave a link below the video if you'd like to check out that study closer now anytime you're going fruits vegetables and you're harvesting them keep in mind when you harvest them they start to deteriorate as far as the nutrients in your vegetables heat light and oxygen or nutrient destroyer so we'll take a look at how we can plant this so that you can pick it fresh and eat it within minutes of picking so now let's look at how we can plant our lettuce from seed the first thing you'll need to do is select your seed and basically there will be about four different types for the home gardener so the first one and probably the most popular one is called loose leaf or leaf lettuce the second one is butterhead the third being romaine and then the last is Chris pad let's take a look at loosely I've grown many different kinds of loose leaf lettuce green star is a great leaf lettuce which is slow to bolt and this is very important for the home gardener who wants to grow lettuce because a lot of times when we plant lettuce it carries on over into the late spring early summer and we start to lose our crop due to bolting because of the heat and we're going to go into that and a lot of depth here in a minute this is a very temperature sensitive crop so whenever you can select a heat tolerant lettuce you're going to have a lot better luck growing lettuce so it's very I'm going to go into a lot of depth on this first section for you then we'll start moving right along okay so another lettuce but I love the grow that's called low LaRosa this one I grow indoors a lot it's not heat tolerant but I really love it I love the little red edges of it a lot of your loose leaf lettuces that can be fringed or just rippled a little bit and then you have another leaf last called oak leaf which looks like a long slender Oakley and I that was probably one of the first ones I grew it was nice I kind of gotten away from growing it a lot of times you'll see these in what's called like a gourmet blend lettuce seed pack and whenever I see those and I see there's a lot of oak leaf in there I don't buy it because I don't know there's just so many more that I've really grown to love over the years one of the other ones is butter head and that you may have heard of as a bib Boston or limestone these are all very similar just a loose heading lettuce it's a very small compact very sweet just a wonderful lettuce now keeping that in mind there's another one it's called summer crisp and it is actually a cross between butter head and you're Chris pad which is iceberg we'll get that in just a second but I love this one this is probably my favorite because it's so heat tolerant and it's just a beautiful little lettuce but you can't plant as much of it as you can loose leaf but I will show you all of this I'll show you how we'll harvest it here in just a minute so you can find those seeds online I'll leave a link to some below the video for you and then our third one is romaine lettuce you can get that in red romaine or the green romaine I love to sometimes just pick a little bit of the leaves or sometimes I'll pull the whole plant that's a very good lettuce for cool-climate it tends to bolt quickly and then the last one is Chris pad we know this as being iceberg lettuce I don't grow it so I don't have an example for you it's now the best soil temperature for your lettuce seeds will be between 45 degrees and 75 degrees Fahrenheit that just means that your lettuce will germinate and you'll see two little leave there but it might not start to really take off and start growing until it's reached a certain soil and air temperatures and this is very important I went over this with you in my Chinese cabbage growing video these coolest season vegetables like a certain air temperature so when your soil temperatures between about 65 and 75 you'll notice you'll start to get more leaves on those little seedlings and also when the air temperature is between the temperatures of 55 degrees and 75 degrees during the day and 50 degrees and 55 degrees Fahrenheit during the night your lettuce should be really taking off at that point and this is important because I want you to know this in case you live somewhere where it's warm if you live somewhere where it's warm you will probably have to start your seeds indoors and that will give them a jump start because you probably are going to have a very short cool season and depending on what variety of lettuce that you grow you will need anywhere from 50 to about 85 days for it to mature you know we can always harvest it at different times we'll go over that later but 50 to 85 days so if you don't have a long cool season we'll need to start them indoors so here's an idea the time to maturity on the different type of lettuces that we talked about your leaf lettuce anywhere from 45 to 60 days your bids or your butter head Boston that will be anywhere from 60 to 65 your romaine 65 to 70 in the iceberg on up to 85 days so the nice thing about you know lettuce and like cabbage you can always just pick a few leaves here and there you don't have to wait for it to mature as a matter of fact I suggest that you don't wait for it to mature because it can tend to get bitter and I always like to if I'm trying to teach you how to grow something and try to tell you when you can harvest it at peak flavor okay not the the size okay we want to grow this for flavor because we have a garden right and we can grow a lot of different things and we might as well take advantage of harvesting it at the best time now the best reference guide that I always mention I think on every video is the square foot gardening book because in this book just about every vegetable is covered and it will tell you how to get anything started from seed ok this is a great reference and so in the back of the book you'll see there is lettuce there it will tell you if you want to start your seeds indoors when you need to do it you'll need to know your frost date in order to determine when you need to start your seeds indoors or also when you want to start them outdoors which is what I do and this is one of the crops that I succession plant and that means I plant it every two weeks so I have a continuous harvest this is something that is always recommended on just about any seed company's website that you do a continual planting of lettuce this will give you the best flavor you'll have fresh leaves okay so you can look at the chart here and it will tell you when to plant it I plant about two squares every two weeks and then I stop around in June and this is because I am quickly approaching those hot summer months that's when I start to get into the 80s and 90s for extended periods of time during the day where I may have been getting into the 80s and 90s in May and June in but only for a very short brief period of time so as I mentioned earlier you know lettuce is very sensitive to those air temperature so just keep this in mind if you live somewhere where it's warm ok so now let's go ahead and talk about how we can get our seeds planted and I'll start here with a square foot garden now if I have started my seeds indoors I will plant four per square foot if I have a loose heading variety like the butter head I will plant two per square foot and then iceberg one per square foot now this is one time where I actually go against the book just a little bit number one you guys know that I used little wooden skewers a lot of times to measure off my box is mostly for demonstration but what I have also discovered over the past many years is that some of my seeds won't come up after a couple of years they are no longer viable but some of them will so it really depends on the type of seed that you're growing as to how long your seeds are good for and I really have not kept a record of that I don't know which ones last no six years and which ones last two so I started to do a few years ago was just take my packet of seeds and I just put them all over the square foot garden bed because I get a lot of seeds in one packet and I like to go a variety of about usually anywhere from four to five different kind every year so I have about probably six months out of the year that I can grow these outside and I do a lot of this at the river garden now because I grow most of my lettuces and indoors and in the green stock system so anyway what I'm trying to say is I have a lot of lettuce seeds and I don't know that I can grow I think I get anywhere from about 500 seeds per pack some of them are about 250 but that's about a thousand seeds for me a year 500 a year if they don't last longer than two years so I like to just put a lot of the seeds out and that way I have not wasted it in my feeds and then I can also harvest lettuce when I think it's the best and the sweetest and that's when it's at this little baby stage you know we buy that at the grocery store a lot so this is how I plant my lettuce and square foot garden now which is quite differently than I did before again if I'm transplanting it I just put them for per square foot or two per square foot or one but if I'm planting the seed I loosen up my soil and if the soil is pretty dry which in this demonstration the soil was very dry I went ahead and watered it first but I did not need to add compost to this as you normally see me do whenever I plant something new because I had already amended my beds it's just the first planting in the spring so now I just need to add some seed and I'm just going to toss these out across the top and lettuce seeds are so tiny they're very hard to work with so I just found that this is easier for me and now I'll just lightly cover it up with just a little bit of soil and we'll water it in again and I'll give it a plant marker just to make sure that I don't go back and plant something over it so we can plant lettuce in a lot of different places and I like to plant it pretty much only in containers maybe my square foot garden but of course indoors but I'm not going to go into that in this video but it will need at least five hours of sunlight but that is not a lot of sunlight so all of you who have shady areas try growing lettuce there you might be very surprised at how well it grows it also grows very well in containers and just make sure your container is about I say about six inches deep is recommended I get better growth out of six inches so a lot of times I put this right in my containers right here by my kitchen door and then I can just sprinkle them out I'll just write them in very lightly into the soil and then water them in and give them a little marker every day I need to go back and miss them just to make sure that they are coming up because if it dries out on top there they won't come up now this is something I love to do and hopefully you have a container or two maybe a tree I like to just take my lettuce because it has a shallow root system and I'll just toss out some seeds right there at the base of my container planets also planting underneath trees like this or bushes that are in containers just just gives that lettuce a little bit of shade which they love okay so between the soil temperatures of about 65 degrees and 75 degrees Fahrenheit you will expect for your seeds to come up in about two to three days if it's a little cooler you can expect it to take longer this is what most of them look like when they start to pop up out of the ground and because I just popped out my seeds you can see that a lot of these are pretty close together normally this kind of bothers me because I am big on thinning out my seeds so that I get nice big mature plants but as you can see I'm growing my lettuce differently than I do a lot of my other vegetables and lettuce grows wonderfully in this little green statical planter it just takes often here loves it so that's a great place to plant it so you've seen me in a lot of other growing videos that I send out different vegetables so this is an example where I thinned out my carrots which means I just cut out the plants that are around it so that the good strong one can grow nice and big and healthy and I've cut them out so that I won't disturb the root system of the carrot also I'll do this with spinach I do it with almost all of the vegetables that I grow now spinach has a long tap root so I don't pull it up I also cut out the smaller little seedlings that are mixed to it this is so I don't disturb the root system of a spinach but like I said is completely their friends and how I do my lettuce I actually let my let us grow for about I'd say three weeks and then I just pull it out the whole plant and this is how I thin my seedlings so now I have baby lettuce I didn't waste any seed it germinated for me I didn't have a throwaway see packs and then I have one left in here that can mature okay and so I have found that this is a wonderful way to enjoy just tender baby lettuce that has so much flavor and a sweet and beautiful and at the same time I can also allow some of the other plants around it to continue to grow doesn't seem to bother them at all they grow nice and mature and I get a beautiful baby green salad here's an example where I let some grow and this was the Batavian variety and just loved it and it was actually almost in June here and it grew really nice I had send out a lot of the seedlings along the way all through May so I just pulled the hell plant so I'm really going into some of the harvesting here because this is a big part of how I send my seedlings I harvest as it grows so I don't waste seeds which is great for me because I don't like to waste anything and I also get all different flavors and stages of growth of my lettuce to enjoy in my salads so here's an example where it was growing at the base of my pomegranate bush and we'll just pull them out as they're growing and I'm leaving some behind so that they can mature and then just a few weeks later it was about to rain and my lens fogged up on me so I had to clean it there but I wanted to show you this was actually an oakley that matured nice and big and healthy and so I use that for a nice salad as I mentioned the green stalk system if you have a very small space and you maybe you'd have some shade this might be a really good idea for you to grow lettuce and always remember you can succession plant your lettuce but I went over that with you in the green stock video how I succession plant in my green stock system I'm always saving a little bit of space at the beginning of the season so that I can go back and plant more two weeks later okay so I'm always pulling and planting pulling and planting it's not much work because I'm doing it from seed and I always have fresh wonderful lettuce I don't have old growth okay so probably the biggest issue you're going to have growing lettuce is not timing your plantings correctly and this is some video footage from 2013 about four years ago where I planted lettuce and I went ahead and I let it bolt I just kind of wanted to see what would happen that's kind of one of the fun things I guess about gardening and so in July and when the heat set in it just bolted right away and so at the top here I'd like to show you what it looks like this was one month later in August these are the seed pods that had developed and I had just shut the top of it a little bit and rubbed it and drop them back into the container just to kind of see when I'd be able to reseed my lettuce this way this was an experiment for me and so that later the following month in September I learned pretty quick this variety of lettuce and I think it was romaine would not let me resew the seed there in the container because well it bolted straight away it didn't even think about growing leaves and I guess it was just a hot temperatures of August and early September that that's why that happened so if you want to save your seed just shake them off into a paper plate and then you can pop them into the bag and then replant those late like for me I would have replanted these late September and into October your lettuce can withstand a frost and again this goes back to the variety some that I've grown frost just kills them right over and then there's some that will hang on in there I've had romaine go through a freeze fine so it just really depends on the kind that you're growing a lot of gardeners have problems with insects and slugs I don't have pictures for you to share I've not had any problems with slugs or insects with my lettuce so maybe this is because I grow them in containers a lot of course I started to grow them indoors where I have no issues with any kind of test so if you really want to grow lettuce a great way to grow it is indoors my air temperature indoors stays at around 70 degrees and so that's the perfect air temperature for lettuce so I guess that's why it grows so well inside so taking care of your lettuce is really very easy you just want to keep it watered it has a very high water content so just water it the shallow rooted so about half inch to an inch each week you'll need to just feed it a balanced water-soluble fertilizer about every 10 days now when I grew it in Florida I actually used a beach umbrella over it when it started to get hot but it just did not do well for me even when I put a shade over it I think it's because I lived one mile outside of a coast and it was very breezy so it was all there was always win there and you know the shade is not going to do anything for that hot wind that's just going over your leaves so it dries it out and kills it pretty quick so I didn't have a lot of luck using shade but in some places you can do that so keep that in mind harvesting lettuce is probably one of the funnest things to harvest because there's really no rules about how to do it if you want just a baby leaves you can just pick off a few leaves and it will continue to grow you can cut it all off and it will grow back and also you can just let it mature and then pull the entire plant there the thing about cutting it back about mid growth is that the stress is out the plan this is just what I found and you may start to get bitter leaves there's nothing that I dislike more than bitter vegetables and you know I have a garden we can Horace's at the best time and have wonderful produce so and for that reason I don't cut mine back all the way but I did go over that with you in the harvest section of the indoor grow system I showed you how you can cut it and how it will grow back but I tend to just pick off the outer leaves or I'll pull the whole plant if I'm thinning out my containers on my square foot gardening boxes I'll just pull the whole the whole baby plant at about 2 or 3 weeks and then I'll let the rest of them mature and I'll pull the whole head then because remember I'm succession planting and I've got four anymore Berlin in another area I always have some lettuce growing with exception of probably July in August for romaine lettuce if you can let it mature all the way if you live somewhere where it's very cool then if you can just harvest the entire head it's very fun to grill that that's one of my favorite sounds and I don't have a recipe on that yet but I hope to soon and that brings me to different ways that you can use it in the kitchen it is a must to have a salad spinner if you have a garden especially for your lettuce not to mention spinach and so I just like to fresh cut my lettuce I'll take it inside I usually try to eat it within just a few minutes if I can and then so we'll pop it in a bowl of water with the salad spinner I'll just give it a very gentle toss these are a lot of baby greens here and I'll just do this until the water runs clear and then I can give it a good spin in the salad spinner and that will just force off all of that water and then we can use our little break to stop it now this is an example using an herb and then it's good to go if I just need a few leaves that's great too just pick it for a little slider a little sandwich also what we like to do especially in the summer when the bass is coming in would like to make basil rolls these are delicious so I have a few leaves there so everyone can help themselves and then it's always fun to set up a little bar where everyone can help themselves and I like to include fresh lettuce on there of course chicken salad I like to just feed it right there on a bed of fresh picked lettuce with an assertion and then some seafood salad right there in the spring when the lettuce is at its peak along with some of the wonderful chives that are also growing of course I always enjoy having it just as a side salad with crab cakes I love to have a salad as a main meal of course it's all like a big salad with all kinds of different cheeses or strip fruit and some sprouts and homemade dressing this is one that's good here with some goat cheese and pickled strawberries that was a really good salad and sometimes just fresh lettuce with some really good dressing and really you just can't beat down I like I tend to like the lighter dressings better than the heavy creamy ones now I don't store my lettuce there was a time where I until I learned how to do succession planting it takes a little while to learn that skill but until then if you have to store your lettuce make sure that you put it in the your crisper drawer and just store it like you would the parsley that I showed you in the parsley growing video just wash it good I used to wrap it up in a little bit of a paper towel and put it in a little bag right in my crisper drawer until I'm ready to use it but once you have your succession plantings down and you've learned your climate usually like I say give yourself about three seasons to learn how to do that you will always have learners and you won't even have to worry about storing it and that's what makes having a garden so much fun so over on my channel you can click on the playlist button and over there I have a lot of different recipes and some are specifically for salad dressings and just different ways that I've used lettuce and so when you get your lettuce up and growing you can head over there for some ideas and maybe make your own recipes so thank you so much for watching and if you haven't already make sure that you click that bell off to the right so you will receive all notifications from my channel thank you so much for watching and y'all have a beautiful day