Multileaf lettuces – Sustainable Market Farming

Success with Growing Lettuce in Winter

Ezrilla, a favorite cold-hardy lettuce.
Photo Wren Vile

Lettuce Seed Inventory and Ordering in September

We’re doing a seed inventory and ordering seeds of winter and early spring lettuce varieties, to get us through to the main lettuce growing season starting in early March. By then we will have received our big seed order for the year.

I’ve updated our Lettuce Varieties List, after perusing catalogs and choosing a few promising varieties new to us.

Lettuce Varieties 2027

We’ve decided not to grow romaine lettuces in our hoophouse this winter (and maybe never again), due to finding too many frozen or at least cold damaged stems last winter. We already gave up growing bibbs in our hoophouse some years ago (tip burn and restricted airflow encouraging fungal diseases.). So we’re left with leaf lettuces. We particularly like the Multileaf types, also variously known as One-Cut, Eazyleaf, Salanova, or Cut and Come Again lettuce.

Red Hawk Farm hoophouse planted wall to wall with multileaf lettuces.
Photo Pam Dawling

These produce “heads” composed entirely of small and medium-sized leaves – the outer leaves do not grow very big. They are bred for uniformly small leaves, with more texture, loft and flavor than baby mixes and faster harvesting. Transplanted 6″–8″ (15-20 cm) apart they produce 40% more than baby leaf mixes. (We transplant at 10″-12″ (25-30 cm), to improve airflow, so our production might not be as much as 40% more than baby leaf mixes.)

The full-size plant can be harvested as a head, providing a collection of bite-sized leaves. But you get higher yields, particularly in winter, if you cut just one side of the plant (or the outer leaves) and let the plant regrow for future harvests. Growing multileaf heads takes 55 days in spring weather, compared to 30 days for baby lettuce.

Lettuce with sclerotinia drop.
Photo Pam Dawling

One of our winter lettuce challenges is sclerotinia lettuce drop, a fungal disease we call Solstice Slime. The Missouri Integrated Pest Management site linked here has lots of excellent photos and info on using an IPM approach to tackling this disease.

https://Image of red and green lettuces including some with Sclerotinia Lettuce Drop. <ipm.missouri.edu/MEG/2016/2/recovered/index.cfm>

Our instructions to ourselves say: “Sow 10 winter varieties, 2′ of each. We want to include Multileaf types. Best slime resistance: Buckley, Ezrilla, Hampton, Brentwood, Merlot, Oscarde, Panisse, Red Tinged Winter, Revolution, Rhone, Tango. Next best: Red Salad Bowl, Salad Bowl. (NO: Hyper Red Wave, Outredgeous, Romaines or Bibbs)” Of our eleven favorite slime-resistant lettuces, eight of them are currently available and in-stock from Johnny’s, High Mowing, or Fedco.

Two varieties on our wish list seem to be discontinued now: High Mowing is out of Buckley and Brentwood and won’t be restocking. They recommend Rhone as a substitute for Brentwood (we grew that one last winter and liked it a lot). They recommend a new Eazyleaf variety called Ezflor as a sub for Buckley, and we hope to try that.

I have notes from last year to try Frisygo, Rubygo, Ezpark from Johnny’s.

Merlox Red Oakleaf lettuce (resistant to Sclerotinia Lettuce Drop) from Fedco

Merlox Red Oakleaf (resistant to sclerotinia) from Fedco sounds very promising – we hope to try that. It’s not a multileaf type, but any winter-hardy lettuce resistant to sclerotinia, especially a red one, is worth trying.

We’re ordering more Oscarde and Red Tinged Winter seed now in case there’s none available next year. We may have enough, but don’t want to take big risks. Red Tinged Winter is a particularly productive and beautiful variety.

In 2026, we had bad germination on everything except Salad Bowl and Oscarde in our 9/15 sowing. I think this was due to inadequate nursery seedbed care. We’ll try to do better this year.

Lettuce Log

We are getting to the end of sowing lettuces for growing outdoors this year (it’s early September). Those lettuces will be harvested in the second half of November.

Lettuce Log by Pam 2024 onwards

Click the + button to enlarge to readable size!

I’ve just updated my Lettuce Log, which is a work in progress, aiming to provide transplants for continuous lettuce year round for up to a hundred people. We tweaked some of the sowing and transplanting dates in hopes of a more even supply. Of course, every year is different, and all are unpredictable. Part of my strategy for resilience is to sow four different lettuce varieties each time, hoping several will thrive. It’s worked out very well this year. We had a slight shortage in August. Some bolted and we got no food from those ones.

As you can see from the log, the intervals between sowing dates get smaller as the year progresses, starting with 14 day intervals in January and February, decreasing rapidly in March and April to land at 8 days for early May, then 7 days and 6 days until mid-June when we start sowing every 5 days. In mid-August we sow every 4 days, then 3. We no longer grow winter lettuce in our coldframe (as the hoophouse provides a much better environment), so we can take a break from lettuce sowing for the first half of September. In the second half of September we sow for transplanting in the hoophouse and the greenhouse in late October.

Looking next at the column of transplanting dates and the column just before it (Days to transplant from sowing), you can see the length of time it takes a lettuce seedling to grow to transplanting size decreases from 51 days in January/February to mid-20s in May, then 20 or below right through to the end of August. You might well ask why we don’t just start sowing later in January, or even wait till February, and that would be a reasonable question. Probably the later-sown ones would catch up! We’re just enthusiastic to get sowing!

The number of days between transplanting one sowing and the next also decreases from 10 days at the beginning of the year down to 4 days in September. September plantings will each take longer than the preceding one to grow to harvest size.

The Harvest Start and Harvest Finish columns have the least reliable data. I hope to pay more attention to this part in 2027! My general goal is to harvest at least 100 good lettuces (from a planting of 120) every week from late April to the end of November.

The columns to the right include details about when we need to shade the transplants, when we put ice cubes on top of the seedbed, and when we watch out for cutworms. Those are topics for a different time of year.

I wrote about our late summer lettuce transition in August 2025, and about winter lettuce in December 2022. Also about Lettuce All year in a Changing Climate in September 2021. I wrote about our Fall Lettuce Transition in my September 2022 post Preparing your Hoophouse for Fall and Winter.

If you want to start from scratch figuring out sowing and transplanting dates for a continuous lettuce supply in your climate see this post, which includes my slideshow Lettuce Year Round and our graph of succession planting dates.

Hoophouses I visited this month

In early November, during the Carolina Farm Stewardship conference I went on the afternoon bus tour to see 10 high tunnels and how they’re used for season extension, irrigation, disease control, pest protection, and trellising. Red Hawk Farm grows salads and greens year-round in six high tunnels (more under construction!), and sells primarily to local grocery stores and restaurants. Funny Girl Farm grows produce year-round for its popular farmstand and CSA, with four high tunnels and a greenhouse.They were focusing on the sweet potato harvest outdoors when we visited.

Red Hawk Farm hoophouse densely planted with multileaf lettuces.
Photo Pam Dawling

At Red Hawk Farm I was astounded to see this whole hoophouse planted wall-to-wall with multileaf lettuces. No aisles! The farmer Brett Evans plans to harvest with a walk-behind motorized salad harvester machine that makes a 4 ft wide cut. Then he’ll leave the lettuces to regrow. He uses the paperpot transplanter which I mentioned last week. Here are the starts growing in their propagation house.

Lettuce starts in paperpots at Red Hawk Farm.
Photo Pam Dawling

They still had peppers bearing well in one high tunnel

Early November pepper harvest at Red Hawk Farm.
Photo Pam Dawling

Another interesting feature was the opening roof vent, which I had not seen in operation on a hoophouse before.

Opening roof vent on a hoophouse at Red Hawk Farm.
Photo Pam Dawling

And this past week, I went to Potomac Vegetable Farms in northern Virginia for a talk with Future Harvest CASA members, and a tour of the hoophouses used there led by farmer Zach Lester. I was interested in seeing the success he is having with caterpillar tunnels. These are smaller tunnels with a single layer of plastic, held in place by ropes, as you see in the photo below. They can be temporary or short-term, and Zach showed us one which is a “swing house” with two sites side by side, sharing one row of ground posts, and having just one row to move each time. Another way to deal with crop rotations and reduce the chances of pests and diseases!

Caterpillar tunnel at Potomac Vegetable Farms.
Photo Pam Dawling

At the ends, the plastic is gathered up and tied to well-anchored stakes, as you can see here.

How the ends of caterpillar tunnels are gathered and fastened to stakes.
Photo Pam Dawling

Zach got these frames custom made by Nolts. They have taller sidewalls than many models. He is also a firm believer in having a ridgepole in caterpillar tunnels, to reduce the likelihood of collapse with snow or high winds. As you can see here, they had some snow already.

Potomac Vegetable Farms caterpillar tunnel showing rolled up side.
Photo Pam Dawling

At both these farms, I learned the technique of laying landscape fabric along the side walls to reduce weed growth. You can burn holes in the landscape fabric where the ground posts go through, and it will keep the weeds away for a long time. I wish I’d known that technique when we put up our hoophouse. We have to hand weed, and in some places we have wiregrass (Bermuda grass) which has grown under the baseboards and even between the boards where there are joins.

Lastly, I have of course visited our own hoophouse at Twin Oaks, and have written a post for Mother Earth News Organic Gardening on Dealing with Snow on Your Hoophouse. So if it’s snowing where you are, you can click on the link to read about that.

Lettuce in December, events updates

Rouge d'Hiver hardy romaine lettuce. Photo Bridget Aleshire — Rouge d’Hiver hardy romaine lettuce.
Photo **Southern Exposure Seed Exchange**

Here’s my monthly article on lettuce varieties month-by-month. I wrote about Lettuce in November a month ago. Of course, at this dark and chilly time of year, plants don’t grow much and our lettuce story is very similar this month to last. Except that we have so much! We are harvesting our hoophouse lettuce mix as well as leaves from the big lettuces in the unheated greenhouse and the hoophouse.

In the unheated greenhouse, we have Green Forest romaine, Hyper Red Wave leaf lettuce, Red Tinged Winter leaf lettuce, Oscarde red leaf lettuce and North Pole bibb. all are looking well.

In the hoophouse in the first planting we have Green Forest, Hyper Red Rumpled Wave, Oscarde, Panisse, Red Salad Bowl, Revolution, Star Fighter and Tango. In the second planting we have some of the same and some different ones: Green Forest, Hyper Red Rumpled Wave, Merlot, Panisse, Revolution, Red Tinged Winter, Salad Bowl, Star Fighter and Winter Wonderland. We are currently harvesting leaves from all the greenhouse and hoophouse lettuces in turn.

These are all looking well too, apart from a few Salad Bowl that have crashed with Sclerotinia Lettuce Drop, known “affectionately” to us as Solstice Slime. It happens at this time of year, around the Solstice – cold damp soil and the presence of spores of this widespread fungus cause destruction of the crown of the plant, which spreads to the leaves and causes the whole plant to collapse into a slimy beige lettuce pancake.

Sclerotinia Drop of lettuce.
Photo http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/r441100711.html

Here is a link to a helpful publication from eXtension: Disease Management in Organic Lettuce Production

Our approach is to try not to over-water in cold weather, and to carefully remove pancaked plants, just before leaving the hoophouse, throw them down-wind into the pasture, and then wash our hands before returning.

Other winter-hardy lettuce we have grown in other years include Marvel of Four Seasons, New Red Fire, Pirat, and Rouge d’Hiver. There are hardy bibb lettuce too: North Pole, Red Cross, Sylvesta, and Winter Marvel, but we have stopped growing them in the winter hoophouse as they are not so useful for harvesting by the leaf and they are more prone to collecting dampness and getting diseased.

I’m sad about the poor showing of our Multileaf lettuces, due I think to keeping pelleted seed too long. My consolation is that we have three lettuce varieties that have a somewhat similar plant type (lots of small leaves that can be removed, letting more grow): Oscarde, Panisse and Tango.

Oscarde letuce Photo Washiington State U Ag Research — Oscarde lettuce
Photo **Washington State U Ag Research**

Panisse lettuce. Photo Johnnys Seeds — Panisse lettuce.
Photo Johnnys Seeds

Tango lettuce Photo Kathryn Simmons — Tango lettuce
Photo Kathryn Simmons

I’ve been taking more bookings for speaking events and groups touring our gardens here. It’s looking promising for me to be at the Mother Earth News Fairs in Asheville (May 6-7) and Vermont (June 10-11). I’ve added in a visit here from the Tricycle Gardens group from Richmond on March 24 and one from the Louisa Master Gardeners on April 13. I’ll add info to my Events page (see the tab at the top of this page) as I get it.

I’ve got my slideshows and handouts ready for the Virginia Association for Biological Farming Conference which is coming up in just a few weeks, January 10-11.