How To Keep Leaf Lettuce Ready To Harvest In Your Vegetable Garden All Year Round

If you're a beginner vegetable gardener looking for tips to actually keep what you're growing alive, there's one resilient staple you should absolutely make sure to plant: leaf lettuce. Beyond easily sprouting weeks after being planted without any special care, you can also harvest their leaves time and time again for weeks or even months — as long as you do it right.

The base of the plant, called the crown, is where new growth sprouts from. As long as this part of the plant remains undamaged, your lettuce can continue to produce new leaves. So, instead of hacking away at the base of each head of lettuce with a knife or kitchen scissors, carefully cut away or pull off the outside layer of leaves, leaving the inner circle intact. This is called the "cut and come again" method. As long as you have some restraint with your harvest, you should be able to collect cuttings from spring all the way through fall — or even winter if you plant cold-hardy varieties.

Because the cut-and-come-again method relies on only harvesting part of the plant each time, it can be hard to collect the amount of lettuce you need, especially if you're making a salad that requires whole handfuls of the plant. The antidote to this problem is to stagger your harvest. In other words, pick half or less of your lettuce plants one week while leaving the other sections alone. The unpicked heads should be ready for you the next week while the original section recuperates and regrows.

Staggering your planting can extend the lifetime of your lettuce harvest even further. If you wait a couple of weeks between planting each batch, you get fresher heads of lettuce to harvest from as time goes by and your older plants start producing fewer or more bitter leaves. Since leaves can also become more bitter simply by growing too large, you can also keep the leaves small by occasionally cutting a whole head off near the bottom; so long as you leave about 1 inch from the base, the lettuce can regrow from a stub. Finally, if you want to keep your lettuce growing as long as possible, make sure you're treating it right. Place it in good sunlight with well-draining soil and water it close to daily. Oh, and wash your lettuce properly before serving — you probably don't want stray dirt in your BLT.