How to Grow the Most Beautiful and Tasty Lettuce Varieties!

It's a little chilly out here this morning, but we already had a cup of coffee so that should warm us up a little bit and There's things to do around the garden and today we got to get this lettuce weeded if this is your first time on our Channel Welcome go ahead and hit that subscribe button and that bell notification down below So you get notified every time we come out with a new video and if you're a frequent viewer of our Channel It's always good to have you back. So here's our fall / Winter lettuce plot we planted in a previous video when we've got 1 2 3 4 5 double rows of lettuce here all different kinds of lettuce Different colors red and green we got those planted on double rows We've got our drip irrigation buried in the middle there keeping them nice and happy and we've had a couple light frost But that doesn't really bother these lettuce. They're growing pretty good But as you can see here It's time to get in here and do a little light Cultivation and take care of these tiny weeds that are popping up But before we do that Let's zoom in and take a look at each one of these Varieties and how they're growing and how close they are to being ready for harvest in the first row here We've got this Cherokee Lettuce, this is a red lettuce you get a little green on the very inside of the leaves there and this is supposed to be a really heat tolerant variety get that weed out of there and this was probably I don't know maybe the slowest growing one I've got and it's probably because we just hadn't had a whole lot of heat This one does really well if you plant it early in fall when the days are still warm But regardless it's growing pretty good You can see there's a lot of dirt on these but a heavy rain in a few days ago that kind of splashed some Dirt up on them gets them a little dirty, but what can you do about that. That's one reason why we use the drip tape try to keep them as clean as possible but this one is starting to head up a little bit and You could harvest this as leaf lettuce if you wanted to but we like to let them wait And make big old heads there And so this thing will start wrapping and making a nice big head we can harvest and cut All at one time and then on our second row here, we've got what I like to call my go-to BLT lettuce, this is our Coastal Star Romaine. It's looking nice and green Nice big leaves there and awesome thing about this lettuce is we really don't have much pest pressure on it I rarely spray this stuff and Bugs just don't seem to bother it This stuff you could cut it right now as baby romaine and we'll probably start cutting some in the next few weeks But as it grows, it'll form some nice tight Dense heads there you can make like a wedge salad out of that so these guys are coming along good and we'll start harvesting some when they're small and Then as the rest of the row kind of grows up, they'll get bigger and we'll harvest some at the bigger stage, too. So it's really nice this time of year these things hold well We don't have to worry about them bolting and we can harvest them Pretty much any size we want and then on the third row here, we've got what I think is probably our most visually Appealing lettuce this stuff right here is absolutely beautiful. Once it heads up. This is called Skyphos butterhead So it's a butterhead type lettuce. That means those leaves are just kind of silky smooth melt-in-your-mouth, this is really really good tasting lettuce here and You can see it's starting to head up there a little bit it's getting a little tight in the middle so it'll be green in the middle and then kind of red on the outside there and This is a great lettuce for making wraps. You've got nice big leaves there that are fairly pliable and You can put some chicken or whatever you want to in there and wrap them up Have a nice little healthy snack and on our fourth row here We've got this lettuce, which I call kind of a spring crisp type It's got these in sized Leaves here. You can see those serrations on the leaves there and this is a great salad lettuce because it has those incisions there or the serrations has a lot more surface area then a rounded leaf so it's going to absorb more dressing and Just make a great salad and these will form a head too they're starting to get a little tight in the middle these will form a nice big head, you know bigger than the palm of my hand there and So we'll let these go until they head up and then we'll harvest them And then on the last row we have this harmony butterhead lettuce and so this has that nice silky smooth texture just like that skyphos lettuce does but this is a all green variety and It has a little different growth Habit as its maturing than the skyphos does this stuff right here Lays out really flat and kind of sprawls for a little bit But then once it starts beheading all this will kind of tighten up and form a nice big Round head that's really dense. You get a lot of lettuce out of these heads right here Because it it packs in there so tightly so these guys still have a little ways to go They're probably a month or so out depending on What kind of weather we have, but uh, if we can get a little warm weather this stuff grows really fast You can stand out here and watch it grow on those 70 degree days. Alright, so we showed you what we're working with as far as what varieties we've got planted and I'll put some links in the description Below so you can check those out and grow some of those if you'd like now It's time to do a little weekly maintenance and the first thing we're going to do is take our little single tine cultivator here and work around those plants There's some close meticulous weeding and then we'll follow that with the wheel hoe now one of the big advantages to growing on double rows besides kind of maximizing space in your garden is that once these things grow up here that foliage kind of shades out those middles and We don't really have to worry about a lot of weed pressure in the middle there. So like this romaine here I'm not going to work Through the middle of that with my single tine and probably not on that harmony butterhead over there since it's kind of sprawled out but like this Cherokee lettuce right here, which hasn't quite Taken over the middle of that double row We need to get in there with our single tine and take care of some of those little tiny weeds that are popping up before they get too big. So all we're really doing here with this single tine is just scuffing that top probably just a quarter-inch of soil and in addition to removing those tiny weeds and keeping new ones from forming what it's going to do is give that Soil some aeration as well and that will really make those plants pop and one little quick side note About the mechanics of weeding and using hand tools like this you don't know how many times I see people that are with a hand hoe or a long handle tool in their garden and They're doing this number right here where they're reaching way out there they've got the implement of the tool a long ways away from their body and they're reaching and Doing it that way and that's going to tire you out pretty quick and it's going to be rough on your back so when you're using Long handle tools like this. It's important to keep the implement close to your feet So walk close to where you're doing it and have this close to your feet. So you're not reaching out here It's going to be a lot easier on you now This is a really easy tool to use but if you use it, right it's even easier and pretty much effortless. Now that we've got our in-row weeding done We're gonna take our single wheel hoe with the three cultivator teeth on it and work these middles. Alright, alright, alright So that's all it takes to keep our lettuce plot Nice and clean just about 15 minutes and as the lettuce gets bigger it takes less and less time because we have to do less work with the single tine and The wheel hoeing part is only about five or six minutes I like to do this at least every two weeks if we get a lot of rain I'll do it once a week in addition to being pretty much pest resistant another great thing about growing lettuces that I really like is that You can kind of control how fast they grow because we've got that drip tape buried beneath those double rows there it makes it really easy to fertilize them and We can push them as hard as we want if we want them to come off real fast We can push them and fertilize them You know once a week or so keep them Watered real nice and we can push them fast or if we wanted to be a little slower We can back off the fertilizer and only hit them once every two to three weeks or maybe once a month So this is my fertilizing setup here, and I've got my fertilizer injector tank there and I've got this four way here And I've got that hose bib for the fertilizer injector that white piece there on one of those connections and then I just moved my water hose over to it when I do want to fertilize and Then this is the magic stuff we use our 20-20-20 here and then that good ole Micro-Boost, so I'll put about Two pounds one and a half two pounds of that 20-20-20 in the tank and about two cups of that micro-boost every time I fertilize them and I've been fertilizing these Trying to about once every two weeks and I'm probably due for another one. I've had a lot of rain lately but uh We can get a little dry spell I'll shoot the juice to them one more time So that's all it takes to grow some nice big heads of lettuce in your garden and you can grow a lot of lettuce in a fairly small space starts out with really good transplants and our seed starting trays allow us to do that and Then we just got to keep them watered and keep them fed they like that water from the drip tape there and those nutrients from that fertilizer that we give them and then that cultivation Every one or two weeks Gives some soil aeration and really makes them pop if you're interested in any or the tools of the varieties we talked about today I'll put links below so you can check those out if you enjoyed this video Give us a big like give us a big thumbs up. Give us a big share and we will see you guys next time.

Channel: HOSS

Views: 16,747

Keywords: lettuce, growing lettuce, lettuce varieties, pelleted lettuce, romaine lettuce, butterhead lettuce, spring crisp lettuce, head lettuce, heat-tolerant lettuce, heat tolerant lettuce, best lettuce varieties, easy to grow lettuce, red lettuce, how to grow lettuce, when to plant lettuce, fertilizing lettuce, when to fertilize lettuce, how to fertilize lettuce, weeding tools, best weeding hoe, drip irrigation, drip tape, drip system, drip watering

Id: -PDYV_OiZOs

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 31 2019