First Winter Lettuce

We harvested our first winter lettuce a couple of days ago from the sowings I did last October with Arctic King. It tasted great. Really smooth and buttery and not at all bitter like I expected for a lettuce that has been in the ground for 6 months! The problem is that only five of them made it through the winter. It’s definitely worth sowing winter lettuce if you have somewhere sturdy to overwinter them (my beautiful poly tunnel got ripped into three pieces by gale-force winds). However, I would recommend that you sow the seed in early September or October. I simply put the seed in too late and the seedlings didn’t have enough time to get strong before they came face to face with the brutal English winter.

Category: Vegetables     Tagged:

6 Comments on “First Winter Lettuce”

  1. am taking a note of that, I get a bit grumpy not being able to grow anything during the winter! enjoy your lettuce!!

  2. Me too…! December was a killer. If it wasn’t for Christmas I swear I would have lost the will.

  3. like the spam question!
    anyway, we must do that this year, as spring salads so expensive! [frantic gardener]

  4. Hi Helen,
    yeah I was getting a bit bored of deleting spam comments from online casinos and places selling cheap viagra. The spam question seems to stop them. Computers can’t add up apparently :)

  5. i use akismet on the main blog as we get a thousand or so a week, but on frnatic gardener blog, have set it up that first comment is moderated, and all those with links. once freed, the rest for that author shouldn’t be moderated. getting only a trickle of spam there. if it picks uip, i will use akismet there too.

  6. Its strange. Some lettuces grown at home leave a bitter taste and others dont. It all depends on the nutrients in the soil and especially moisture content