This text is part of the special book Plaisirs
How satisfying it is to take a few steps in the vegetable garden to harvest a good fresh salad! Easy to grow, lettuce, spinach, endive, arugula and mesclun mix are the favorites of Quebec households. Their only flaw: they tend to go to seed quickly. When this happens, leaf production stops, a stalk rises from the center of the plant, and the remaining leaves turn bitter. Fortunately, you can harvest fresh lettuce leaves all summer long thanks to three methods that we’ll show you just now!
Staggered planting
The first method is to plant salad seeds in a small area every two or three weeks. The plants will follow one another all summer, providing you with fresh and tasty leaves. It is enough to pull up the lettuce plants that are starting to climb and make other seedlings. You can sow until mid-September for the last harvest of the season.
Serial harvest
The second method is carried out by harvesting only the outer leaves of the lettuces as soon as they are large enough (10 to 12 centimeters in length), leaving the heart, where the growth tip is, intact. This preserves the plant and encourages it to produce new leaves rather than flower. A week or two later, the leaves from the outside of the rosette can be harvested again and the plant will produce new leaves again. This method can sometimes delay the rise until late summer.
Note that romaine lettuce will lend itself better to this technique than leaf lettuce. For mesclun salad mixes, some varieties will persist longer than others.
High cut
The third method is to cut the salad plant when its leaves reach 10-12 centimeters in height. Cut all the leaves from each plant about 2.5 centimeters from the base, which will leave the heart exposed, but intact. After about two or three weeks it is possible to harvest again, using the same technique. You can then repeat the process and extend the harvest for almost the entire season!
Salad care
To obtain the expected results, it will be necessary to ensure very good growing conditions for your lettuces! This involves watering them without ever letting the soil dry out completely and using rich soil and proper fertilization. We recommend that you apply compost at the start of the season, then water with seaweed fertilizer or fish hydrolyzate every two weeks or so. Don’t worry if your vegetable garden becomes more shady in mid-summer because of tall vegetables, they will cool the plants!
Now that you know these three methods, with a little practice and attention you can enjoy fresh and crunchy salads all summer long!
This content was produced by the Special Publications team of the Duty, relating to marketing. The drafting of Duty did not take part.