Lettuce.

- Alys Fowler: let's hear it for lettuce | Life and style | The Guardian: "Thomas Etty"
Lamb's Lettuce
Viola's (edible flowers)
Nasturtium
Drunken Woman Lettuce
Mizuna
Komatsuna (Mustard Spinach)
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Lettuce.

Lettuces to grow-
Cos Lettuce: Little Gem - 'Little Gem' will do well from an early sowing and certainly is always worth finding room for in the garden, 
Lobjoits Green- 'Lobjoits Green Cos' is a better cos, much bigger, rather slower to develop and with a shorter season, but probably the best lettuce that you can grow or eat,
Rouge d’Hiver- 'Rouge d'Hiver' is a cos that will grow in cooler conditions (although not really over winter).
Butterhead Lettuce: Tom Thumb, Merveille de Quatre Saisons.
Looseleaf: Salad Bowl, Red Oak Leaf.
Red Lettuce: Red Salad Bowl, Aruba.
Iceberg: Mini Green.
Winter Lettuce: Winter Density, All the Year Round -  'All the Year Round' is, as the name implies, hardy and adaptable enough to crop most of the year, and while not the best you can grow, it's a lot better than almost anything you can buy, especially in that spring gap when there is precious little else in the garden.
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Mistakes:
Dont plant too many seeds all at the same time and far too close together. 


Lettuce pray.
Lettuce germinate at surprisingly low temperatures; many will fail to germinate once the soil temperature rises above 25C - which you often get from mid-June to August. This can lead to a dearth of lettuce in August, as mature plants suddenly go to seed and there is a lack of young plants to replace them, because germination has been poor in the previous month. There are ways around this. Sow in the afternoon so that the vital germination phase coincides with the cool of night. Sow in seed trays and put them in the shade, and cover with glass or newspaper to keep them cool until the seedlings appear. And if the seeds are showing no signs of life after a week, put them in the fridge for 24 hours. In fact, late August- and September-sown lettuce do very well because the nights are getting cooler.


If you are sowing directly into the soil (something I never do nowadays, as slugs attack the very young seedlings in my garden), water the drill before sowing to cool the soil down. And make sure you sow into a shaded part of the garden.

Your roots: How to get the most from your lettuce leaves

Lettuce needs cool temperatures to germinate, and may become dormant if the soil is above 20 C. They like a rich soil with good drainage.

Most lettuce is best sown in drills about in deep as thinly as possible. Water the drill before you sow the seed. Flick the soil back over the sown drill and mark it. Thin as soon as the seeds can be handled, leaving an initial inch between seeds, then use the young lettuce alternately until the final crop has 4in space between each plant. I now sow all my lettuce individually in soil blocks or plugs in a cold frame or a greenhouse and transplant when they are a few inches tall (they resist slug attacks).

The following have a good selection of seed: Simpson's Seeds (plus nine rare organic lettuce from France), 27 Meadowbrook, Old Oxted, Surrey RH8 9LT (tel/fax             01985 845 004      ); www.naturalhub.com/index.html- an excellent lettuce page; The Veg Finder (£5.99, The Henry Doubleday Association), 20 pages of lettuce; Ryton Organic Gardens, Ryton-on-Dunsmore, Coventry (            02476 303 517      ) has a huge range of salad crops growing under different organic conditions; Heritage Vegetables by Sue Stickland (£14.99, Gaia Books Ltd) is an excellent introduction to rarer and more interesting vegetables, including 20 lettuce.

Corn Salad Seed 'Vit' (Lamb's Lettuce)

Corn Salad Seed 'Vit' (Lamb's Lettuce): "Corn Salad Seed 'Vit' (Lamb's Lettuce)"

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