Mission Endure 65: Winter Lettuce
Last night was my favorite night of the year. It was the first frost here in southern Illinois. I love the cool, crisp weather because it signals the end of the growing season for most of our garden, and serves as a reminder that it is time to slow down and concentrate on indoor activities. Mowing the lawn, watering the yard, maintaining the garden, and washing vehicles all give way to indoor projects. It was a very late first frost this year. Normally we have first frost some time during the second or third week in October, but this year it held off till the first week in November.
My favorite thing that the first frost does is it starts our outdoor bug-free time. When the weather dips below freezing at night the bugs die off and we are bug-free until we experience our last frost around April 15. This is the best and most organic pesticide and nature provides it every year free of charge.
When the temperature gets down to the 40s at night we normally start moving our sensitive outdoor plants indoors. We have a couple of shelving racks with LED lights on them that help our plants thrive indoors all winter. This year, when we moved the plants indoors we also planted indoor lettuce in half gallon pots. They have been growing for about two months now and are producing lots of great, healthy looking lettuce for us. It is too late in the year to get much of a lettuce crop outdoors before the weather gets cold, so indoors works well for us during the winter. We do succession planting so that we have plenty of lettuce all winter. By the time our first crop of lettuce starts to slow down and stop producing our second crop should be ready to start harvesting. About the time we start harvesting our second crop of lettuce it will be time to plant a third crop. When I say harvest it is not a complete harvest, we only take enough leaves of lettuce to get us through each day. The lettuce continues to grow and produce more leaves to replace the ones you pick off. This is called cut-and-come-again harvesting. Each lettuce plant will continue to produce for several months. We planed 16 heads of lettuce from seed and they are doing incredibly. Our indoor lettuce crop looks very healthy and green.
During the first planting we only planted Parris Island Cos, a Romaine type of lettuce. The second planting we decided to try planting a variety of lettuce types. We planted more Parris Island Cos, along with Black Seeded Simpson, May Queen Butterhead, and Flashy ButterGem. This should give us a variety of Romain and leafy lettuce. You can see those different varieties planted in the pots to the left of our current crop.
Here is what our set up looks like at this point. We tried new LED lights this year and they are working very well. They are expensive, about $100 for 6 lights, so each set of shelving will cost about $100 for lights, but they work so much better than anything we have used before. You can see the box they came in on top of the shelving. That box fit all 6 lights. This is our winter growing shelf we have set up in the office. We will add more plants to the shelf when we plant them. We have another two shelves where our outdoor plants overwinter at home.
This set up helps us enjoy growing our own lettuce throughout he winter. When you go to the supermarket in the middle of winter and see how much lack of green is in the lettuce there it makes you happy you grow your own at home.
If you enjoy nice green lettuce all winter long try growing your own. The seed is very inexpensive, about a penny a piece. The shelving is about $100 per unit, and the lighting is about $100 per unit. Most of the pots are recycled from plants we have bought over the last couple of years. So, for about $200 you can get a set up that will keep you knee high in lettuce, and whatever else you want to plant for several years.