Lettuce Grow a Salad

Right now is a great time to sow some lettuce seed, water it, and watch it grow. This is a great kid project with many teaching possibilities (spiritual, nutritional, learning responsibility, etc).

Lettuce can be grown in a vegetable plot, a flower bed or even a large flower pot. Just make sure your area receives around 6 hours of sunlight each day.

I planted mine in our vegetable garden. I used three types of lettuce: a romaine mix, a butterhead mix, and some mesclun. The first two are leaf-type lettuces and mesclun is a Spring Mix of several types of greens.

Prepare the soil by tilling with a spade or hand shovel. Then rake it smooth. Sprinkle your seed on the soil, not to heavily.

Use your rake to lightly cover the seed with soil. A good general rule is to plant your seed twice the depth of the seed, so for lettuce, that’s not very deep!

Next, I like to pat the soil with my hand, just to ensure that the seed won’t blow away and is covered with fine soil.

Now, using a sprayer on your hose, lightly spray the newly planted area with a mist of water until the soil is well-watered, being careful not to dislodge the seed.

Lettuce seed will sprout in about a week, depending on the weather. The most important thing is to keep the soil moist, watering as much as twice or more a day, until germination. Soon, you will see baby lettuce plants! (My seed packet even says, “guaranteed to grow”. And it is! I'll show you on Friday.

Let the lettuce grow to about 4 inches before harvesting for your salad. Pick leaves from the outside of the plant and allow the center to continue growing. You should be able to enjoy your lettuce until about the end of June, when our Oklahoma weather is too hot, and the lettuce will get bitter tasting and go to seed.

There’s something very spiritual about digging in the dirt, watching seeds grow into plants and harvesting! You’ll be hearing plenty more from me about gardening and life applications.

And let me know if you try it. Take pictures! Send them to me and I’ll post them here.

PS – another easy thing to grow for your salad is radishes. They grow so quickly, although many children don’t care for the flavor.