- Lettuce seeds are just slightly more tricky to germinate than some other vegetables. And I'm gonna do a little trial actually, in the process of explaining it to you, using different composts. And one of the composts I'm
gonna make in-situ here, which is standard sowing, potting compost, multipurpose, multicompost,
it will go under many names, but it's basically bog standard compost that you could use for sowing, potting on, pricking on, planting out kind of compost. And it's part peat, recycled peat, part green waste with some nutrients and to it I'm adding quite
a lot of vermiculite, which you can buy in garden centers. And this is some kind of expanded rock. It's very, very light, has no goodness in itself, but it improves the drainage. I'll put it all in. Right, so basically this vermiculite is a way of ensuring that roots have air. This is one way that lettuce sometimes goes wrong when it's sown, which is that the roots get too wet. 'Cause the water can't drain and it hangs around then the roots rot. Basil is another seed this happens to. So for my basil and lettuce in particular I'll do this to the compost, add a decent amount of vermiculite. It could also be perlite, very similar or sharp sand, very
small pieces of gravel. The vermiculite I really
like because it's so light and the seedlings do really like it. So here we have the seed tray and this is the experiment on its way. So filling half the tray with this compost and the other half with
a different compost, which you'll see in a
minute is my homemade. That's one half. This is the other half and I'm finding this works
really well for lettuce too. So this is homemaker's, homemade compost from a heap which had it's
main ingredients added eight months ago, last summer. We're in February now so this is early lettuce
we're sowing here. And that means the lettuce are going to be ready to
prick out in about a week, which will be early March. And that means they're going to be ready
to plant out in the garden three or four weeks after that, depending how big we let them grow. So that will be, probably early April. There we have it. So this he's ready to sow now. I'm just tamping it down lightly, it doesn't want to be too firm. And what I'm going to do is sow basil, lettuce across. I'm actually thinking that I'm going to take
this cardboard out because, or maybe I'll leave it in. This is really, really
thinking on the hoof here. But I think this is going to
make a fascinating comparison. So here's the watering can,
get this compost fully moist. and then there's six varieties of lettuce which I'm going to sow across the tray so each variety, half of it
will be in the vermiculite mix and the other half will be
in the homemade compost. that's home saved Grenoble Red, home saved Lollo Rosso,
home saved Winter Density, home saved Bijou, some bought Tuska and bought Cantarix. And these lettuce are
all for leaf lettuce. So that means that we're going to be picking off their outer leaves, not letting them heart up. And I need to be reasonably precise here. Actually, for my purposes,
it doesn't matter too much if some of these seeds
should get mixed up a bit. Because this is home saved seed there's quite a bit of
other debris coming out. That doesn't matter at all. If you get into saving seed you haven't got to get it as
clean as the seed you buy. The seed you buy has really
been cleaned up big time. I guess the seed companies
wouldn't think they look good if they're selling seed
with lots of debris. But for home save seeds, as long as it's dry when
it goes in the packet, that's the main thing. The difference with home
saved seed and bought seed is that that the home saved seed has, what you know it's going to be fresher. I actually sowed a bit
more than I meant there, but basically I'm dropping it on here and aiming to have, for me, I need quite a few lettuce. I'm a salad grower. So that's the one bit of doing this that I wouldn't copy at home, is the amount of seed I'm sowing. And, oh, that's interesting, now that's a dark seeded lettuce, do you see the difference? It actually doesn't make
much difference how they grow but for some reason some lettuce seeds the
dark and some are white. Mostly they're white. And what have I not shown yet? Winter Density, that's good. Winter Density is a lovely dark green cos which you can also grow to make a heart, but you can also pick the outer leaves. So in fact, most of these lettuce will make a nice heart
if, if one let them, but they are also very suitable for regular harvest of the outer leaves. So that's Winter Density, that leaves just the Bijou. Bijou is a lovely variety which sadly is not as
available as it ought to be. It comes and goes a bit
in the seed catalogs. It's the darkest red lettuce I know. It's a cos so it's
reasonably upright habit. And I've taken to saving my own seed because that way I know that I can get hold of it each
spring and summer too. So to save your own seed basically what you need to do is just select one of your lettuces as a nice looking one and vigorous and then not pick it, let it
go to make a heart, flower, and keep the seeds in the autumn. There we have the seed tray sown. So we've got six varieties,
half one side, half the other. I'm going to put a tiny little
bit of compost in this case, the homemade compost on top. Lettuce really does prefer
to be not covered too much, partly I think because that
can hold it in a bit too wet. It's a seed that doesn't
like to be too soggy. So I'm just putting a tiny bit on top and then not even as much that
all the seeds are covered, you can still see some of them. And then the other side, I'm going to put some of
the vermiculite mix on top, aiming to do all equivalent, so about the same amount on each side. And it's gonna be fascinating
then to see what happens. I'm watering a little
bit over that whole tray. What you want to avoid at this point is making the seeds float 'cause otherwise they will get mixed up. And that is now ready to
be germinated, basically. So it will appreciate late
February, early March, some warmth. So it could be either on my hotbed here or in fact I think what I'll do is bring it into the conservatory. That's replicating probably
what most people would have, a window still, house temperature. And we'll see how that goes. It's now a week since these
lettuce seeds were sown and half of them I put in
compost with 50% vermiculite and half in the homemade compost from here and look at the difference. So that's the bands of the
same seed going across, there's six varieties. And you can see the ones
in the homemade compost, they've germinated but they're not growing
so strongly or vigorously, They look a bit darker, not quite so healthy as the
ones in the vermiculite compost. And I attribute that to root development. Basically, lettuce
roots are very sensitive and especially do not like water logging. And I think that's a bit
of what's going on here, even though I've not watered
this tray since sowing, well actually, I put a
bit of water on that side, but not on this side. So it's just that the roots. If we take one out we
can have a look actually because I'm going to also
show you pricking out. So for example, here's a lettuce
from the homemade compost and look at its root. It's really struggling to grow. That that would grow from pricking out, I can put that in the module
tray and that will grow. But what I'm going to do mostly here is take some seedlings from this side where the lettuce are not very big but they are ready to prick out. There are, by the way,
many more lettuce here than most people growing
up home would need. There's probably in
there about 400 lettuces if you pricked every single seedling out. So when sowing seeds like this, you don't need to even do as many as that, you know, small, very
small seed tray is good. And then you can pick
out the strongest ones as you prick out. So yeah, that one I'm not even going to do 'cause the root looks a little bit weak, but here's a nice strong one. You can see the root is very vigorous and wanting to grow. So the pricking out method is, in two words, is to bung it in, sorry, three words. It's not about being too precious. These roots do not have
to go down vertically. They can just go in the hole as long as they're all in there. The other thing I did
before this picking out, when I filled this module
tray with putting compost, any kind of multipurpose
compost for potting is good. And I put in, I then watered it. So basically, it's really moist and that makes it very soft and much easier to prick
out these seedlings, some of which are quite long. And the other key thing
about picking out, I find, is to put them deep. So you want to bury all of that stem, it's about a finger's width of stem, is all going to go in the hole and that is fine. It doesn't rot or anything, but what it does is it makes it, turns it from being a leggy seedling into a sturdy little plant which has a much shorter stem which is going to serve it well when it comes to planting out time. So these seedlings are now
going to stay in this tray until they're grown into
quite sturdy plants. In fact, I can show you
here what they'll look like in about two weeks, I would estimate. So these are some pricked
out two weeks ago, and you can see, although they're slightly
different variety, but it's the same principle. Pricking out means you
get a lovely full tray, no gaps, all pretty constant 'cause you can prick
out stronger seedlings. And then one is waiting
for the roots to be filling these modules of compost. And you can see at this stage they're not, they're looking all right there, but they need another two weeks. So it's often about four weeks from picking out to transplanting
at this time of year, in the late winter, early spring Lettuce plants are really nice to grow because they're so fast. Here are some that I sowed five weeks ago and they're in big
modules so that's helped. Actually these, these are not far off that you can almost start
picking a few leaves to eat, like these outer leaves, and I'm going to plant
them now, show you how. So I'm gonna make for these ones, which are big with a deep module, I'll make a deep hole. It's as simple as that. Always looking to plant them
slightly on the deep side. And here's another option,
from one extreme to the other. So these are much younger plants. Sown on the 1st of April, so
that's actually very recently, we're now the 17th, these are not much more
than two weeks old. And these could grow some more but you could also, you could
plant a lettuce like that. There's absolutely no golden
rule about planting size. It's often made out to sound like, oh, you got to wait until
they're a certain size or a certain age or whatever it might be. It's more than a little plant like that, maybe I wouldn't put it in where there's huge armies of slugs. You know, a big plant like
these will have more chance if you've got potential
pests, that kind of thing. But I find on the whole
that small plants like this transplant, not only are
the easier to transplant, but they settle in and root more quickly. And here's another option, which is, these are actually some
plants I was given in modules and I wasn't ready to plant them. So I just put them into
this little tray of compost, this is multi-purpose potting compost. And these plants came in little modules and that was only four or five days ago. So all these new roots that you can see coming
out of the module there, the original module's
quite small in the middle. So that's all happened just in a few days. We're now in the middle of spring and this is the time that
lettuce want to grow. Their natural cycle of
growth is to germinate either in late or early
spring, grow vigorously, make their heart and
drop seed by late summer. So what I'm going to
do now before planting, because it's been very dry here the last over two weeks, actually, we've not had any rain. You can see the surface is dry but there is nice moisture underneath. I could dig a whole straight into this, but it's going to be easier
if I put some water on it, because that just means
that as I dig holes the water or the moist compost
on top will fall in the hole rather than dry compost. In the summer this is something
I would recommend to do quite systematically before planting. At this time of year, not
so often like I'm saying, but I'm just putting on, just tickling it up a
bit, really, with moisture and then dibbing the holes. This is the method I use
rather than using a string. I line up, I'm putting, and this bed is quite narrow. It's about one point, it's
about one meter actually , not much more, three and a half feet, see? And I'm putting in, as you
can see here, seven rows, actually that's a little bit high. Gosh, I did, I managed to
squeeze in seven rows there. I think that's a little bit much. I might try six now. I mean, you've got options on spacing. If you give your plants more space they will tend to live longer. The method of picking that I'm using here is regular removal of the outer leaves means I'm keeping the plant young. It's like a perpetual teenager. And that means that it keeps on wanting to
grow for a longer time. And therefore, if you give
them a bit more space, like here I'm gonna do the six rows, and this is going to be the big plant so I need deep holes. These really are slightly monster modules. I don't normally use modules this big. So it's good on this video, I think, that you can see that as an option. It's like with so many things, you can do it in so many ways. Just the main thing is you
understand what you're doing and what the results will be. We have here different varieties. The ones I've just planted
from the big modules is Maravilla de Verono. It's an old Italian variety, which is sold as a hearting lettuce, makes very nice heart, crisp, crunchy, but you can also treat
it like I'm going to, as a leaf lettuce where you
take off the outer leaves and it crops for a very long time so I really like it for that and very sweet, tasty leaves. This is one, by contrast,
is a bog standard cos, let me see, what is it called? Cantarix, it's from King Seeds, but any of these green cos, they're all quite similar, really. They also will make a
heart if you let them, like a romaine, so that's one option. And if you wanted a big heart, you can plant them at
slightly closer spacing than I'm using here. So I'm putting all of these lettuce in at the same spacing of around about nine or 10 inches. Just gonna pop one more
Maravilla in there. So these green cos,
other suitable varieties are Parris Island Cos, and that's widely available. There's also quite old
ones called Chartwell even Lovejoy, it's
standard romaine variety, cos lettuce, dark green, sold for heart, is very good for leaf. These ones I'm leaving 'cause you see how they are quite a bit
smaller than the other ones? If I see that while planting, I tend not to plant them unless
I'm really short of plants because they're gonna
probably be a weaker plant that won't do so well. So now I'm moving on to, this is actually an old
fashioned variety of lettuce called Goldring, I think it was, Brown Goldring, which I was sent. It's a heritage variety
that the breeders asked me, or the seed savers asked me to try. So to be honest, I don't know
exactly what it's gonna do but it's, you know, that's one of the lovely
things about growing that you can have a bit of fun and experiment, try new things
that you haven't done before and not everyone will work but the ones that do give
a little bit of pleasure. Two more of these and then I'm going to
put in the little ones. So yeah, you can see how,
I'm quite impressed actually, in the few days that those
plants have been in there they've been in the greenhouse so that's also helped them to go on a bit. And I've got some rather deep holes here which I'm just filling in a little bit 'cause these are now for the
little baby lettuce here. So these are tiddlers really, I'm just going to pick out the
bigger ones actually, for now 'cause I don't really want
to plant all of them yet. Actually, that one's broken a bit. But I'm putting it in, again quite deep. And another thing is
about firm the ground. Do you see I'm being quite
firm with these little plants. I'm not being too precious. They're amazingly robust. So you just make a little hole, pop them in and off you go. And the one last thing
that they're going to need after this is water. That's the most important thing
that needs to happen here. And after that, I'm going
to cover with fleece, not so much for weather
at this time of year, we're in the middle of April. Lettuce are very hardy. Lettuce can stand frost and these will need to, because it's going to
freeze, almost certainly, in a couple of days time. We're forecast frost quite
a bit over the next week, late April, typical for the time of year. That will not damage these lettuce, they can freeze and survive, but the fleece is more about
keeping cold winds off. There's also forecast to
be quite cold winds by day. The watering process is quite similar to how I was explaining it for sowing where at this point it's really worthwhile to make sure that the bed is not totally saturated but at least very moist. And that the it's not only about giving water to these little plants, it's about the water pushing compost on the surface around the little roots, so that the plants are well
bedded into their new home. These are some lettuce that we planted less than three weeks ago, around 20 days. And they were at the time
four weeks old from sowing. So they're seven, eight weeks old, which is a pretty typical stage to start picking outer leaves if you're using this method. If I wanted these plants
to grow into hearts I would need to wait another six, seven, eight
weeks, depending on the variety. So this method I'm showing you here of taking off the outer leaves is a way of getting much earlier harvest. And also then you can come back a week later for another pick. And so it's a way of
having continuous harvest rather than feast or famine. And there's two stages here. The first leaves I'm taking
out are the old ones, not quite the cotyledons, but you can see this is quite an old leaf. It's starting to go yellow, mildew. That is not a problem, it's just a function of the leaf's age. And then just above that, the next oldest leaf is looking good. Check the back as well, nice. So that's going in my good bucket. Whenever I'm picking I have two buckets. That's the good ones and that's a reject. And the end result is we have a plant which is only got nice new leaves. And that will, one could
come back now in a week and find anything between
five and seven new leaves, even more than that sometimes, if it's really warm weather In this case here, we're middle of April. So this has a lot of growing in it because this is the main time of year when lettuce really like
to make lots of new leaves. And this is a variety called Saragossa which is a, like Grenoble
Red it's a Batavian. So it's crunchy leaves, the leaves are, they've got
a bit of a snap to them. They're actually really sweet as well. Here we have completely
different variety called Bijou which I grow mainly for its color. These are slightly bitter. Red leaves tend to be not so sweet. So if I had a choice
just on eating quality I would go for the Saragossa. But the Bijou I put in my mixes, you know, if you're doing this at home, you'd just want one to two plants, really. I've just got a few for
many, many other leaves to go with them. So again there, I did exactly the same. It's just automatic really. Once you get into the way of doing this, you can get quite quick. The first pick or two,
is what takes more time. And also something else is to pull out any weeds
that you find as you go. So this is first pick, taking off the nice leaves and removing the lower
ones that are not so good. And then the last thing is
to decide when you stop, how many leads do you take? I'll do something extreme here and take off something
I wouldn't normally do, but taking off even more so you can see we've
got quite a small plant. And this one won't grow back as quickly as if I'd left more leaf on, but it will be fine, this will survive. Most of a plant's photosynthesis is being done by those leaves, around 80% I've read in some studies, suggest that 80% of the photosynthesis is been done by those leaves compared to the larger ones around. (gentle guitar music)
