I hesitate to write about this because, every time I talk about a new innovation and how great it is working, it fails, but….my lettuce system is working really well this summer.
I have been planting out starts for all of my greens for years because it saves seed and improves germination, and lettuce has been no exception. For five or six years, planting the starts out worked beautifully for the spring and early summer and then fell by the wayside by mid-July. The heat, maybe?…the refusal of any seed to germinate after the Summer Solstice? Pill bug munch at germination? If it did germinate, it was eaten by something, and that “something” changed regularly. I was without lettuce for a vast swath of the year, so we ate cabbage salads. It’s not the same.
Last year, I decided to plant the lettuce starts in olive oil tins. First, I thought it would look cool—which is does—and it also gave me greater flexibility during dramatic changes in temperature. Cold snap—move them to the greenhouse. Heat wave—move them into the shade. Nice weather—line them up along the fence to admire. The harvest was also very clean.
This year, I started doing the same thing with the starts and it has worked really well. Two heads per tin. The greens are thriving. As I harvested a tin, I replanted it with another set of starts waiting in the greenhouse. Sometimes, I mixed a little compost or fertilizer in the soil to give it a boost. Last week, I didn’t have any starts waiting, so I direct seeded a tin every evening that we had salad. Germination looks nice. We will have bit of a lag in lettuce in a week, but that’s ok because we are going camping anyways. The tins are all living in an old wheelbarrow with a hole in it already for drainage, so I can move them round depending on climate. We shall see. It is my hope to keep it going well into fall this year, even if I have to put the tins under lights in the greenhouse. That is, if the system survives being written about….
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