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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Photo High Mowing Seeds
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 (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.
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.
