We’ve been eating our own lettuce for ages now. Having six heads growing in troughs in the greenhouse has been great, as it means we’ve been able to tear off a couple of leaves as we’ve made our sandwiches each morning, and saved a fortune on cut salad from the supermarket. While that invariably goes off after a few days, this stuff just keeps on growing, and is always fresh.
It’s also far mealier than the thin, weak lettuce you get from the shops, with thick leaves that make for a very satisfying addition to a sandwich.
By sewing our seeds in succession, we still have two new heads coming through as our mature heads are starting to approach the ends of their productive lives, and as the growing matter for the newer heads isn’t so good as what we used for the first four, their progress has been slowed still further.
The last time we bought a lettuce in the shops was about 10 weeks back, when it cost 49p. That was actually pretty cheap, but if we take it as our guide, and reckon on having otherwise bought a lettuce a week, we’ve saved a fiver, at least, by growing our own, and it’s tasted much better.
So the verdict on lettuce this year is a definite thumbs-up. I didn’t think it would have been, as last year’s plants were a washout. I’m putting that down to the fact that they were grown outdoors while these ones have been raised in the greenhouse.
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