Italian Lettuce and Salad Seeds
Lettuce is where growing your own pays for itself fastest. A bag of leaves costs a couple of euro and is limp in three days. A €3.50 packet sown in short rows every fortnight will keep two people in salad from May to November, and with the winter types, well past that.
Cut and come again beats hearting types
Most Irish gardeners plant hearting lettuce, wait eight weeks, cut one head and have nothing left. Loose leaf and cutting varieties work far better here. Sow thickly in a short row, cut the leaves about three centimetres above the soil, and the same plants regrow two or three more times.
Salad through an Irish winter
The Italian catalogue is unusually strong on cold weather salad, because northern Italian winters are wet and cold in much the same way Irish ones are. Winter lettuce sown from mid August to late September will crop into spring under a cloche or in a tunnel. Lamb's lettuce is hardier still and needs no protection at all. Radicchio and escarole actually improve after frost, turning sweeter as the temperature drops.
That gives you a genuine year round salad bed rather than a summer one. Many of these are heritage varieties you will not find in an Irish garden centre.
Sowing notes for Ireland
Sow thinly and shallowly, no more than a centimetre deep. Lettuce seed needs light to germinate, so burying it is the most common mistake.
Sow little and often. One big sowing gives you forty lettuces in the same fortnight and nothing either side of it. A short row every two weeks from March to September is the whole trick, and our when to sow guide sets out the timings.
Slugs are the real enemy in an Irish garden, not cold. Young lettuce seedlings in a damp autumn will vanish overnight. Sow into modules and transplant when the plants are big enough to survive a nibble, and go out with a torch after rain.
In a hot dry spell lettuce bolts and turns bitter. Some afternoon shade in July and August keeps it sweet.
Garden to table
Good leaves, good olive oil, a little red wine vinegar, salt. Radicchio grilled rather than raw if the bitterness is too much. Lamb's lettuce with walnuts and pear. Add a few fresh herbs and the salad stops being a side dish.
Packets start at €3.50 and delivery is included on orders over €40. Seed registered with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, posted by An Post from Co. Longford.