By clicking ALLOW or clicking on any other content, you agree that cookies can be placed. OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute) Listed. Iceberg lettuce is great in salads, wraps, and a variety of other recipes. Place the plants 10 inches apart from each other in 20-inch-wide rows. Start lettuce indoors 4 weeks before transplanting; sow or transplant lettuce into the garden as soon as the soil can be worked. Vegetables That Easily Survive Transplanting. Water the seedlings a few hours before you transplant them, so that the stems and leaves are turgid and the growing mix will stick to and protect the roots. Pick your lettuce from the outside to the inside. Then spray the soil again 5 to 8 times until it turns a dark color. Transplants should be planted near the last frost-free date for the growing area. Tip #5: Effectively Care for your Lettuce THIS Way! You will also want to keep the room temperature between 50-65 degrees Fahrenheit. This article will help solve this problem and give ALL experience levels of gardeners Easy-to-Follow Tips on growing lettuce from seed. This can be a difficult question to answer for beginner gardeners because of complex factors like weather, soil, and pests. Transplanting Head Lettuce. TRANSPLANTING for HEAD LETTUCE: 3–4 weeks before field planting, sow in 128-cell trays barely covered with vermiculite or fine soil. In this quick guide we outline which plants work best for transplanting and which don’t. Begin planting fall lettuce in late summer so it reaches maturity when the fall air is cool. This type of seed is what most gardeners use when learning how to grow lettuce from seed. While there are hundreds of varieties of lettuce you can grow, I am recommending 4 kinds to choose from. Dig holes in rows 16 inches (40.6 cm) apart, just deep enough to plant the root balls underground. Immediately after you do this, spray the soil about 5 to 10 times. Head Lettuce: Keep 14–20 days, less for delicate types like butterhead and oakleaf, and longer for lettuce grown slowly in cooler temperatures. If you’re short on space and try planting plants closer they will end up not doing as well in the end. Remove harvest debris to improve regrowth quality. Cover with a very thin layer of compost or vermiculite. *If you put your seeds closer than 4 inches they will burn and die. If a hard freeze threatens, protect the seedlings with a cloche or row cover. These leaves will look different from leaves that will grow later. If you transplant your lettuce before the last frost it may die. Because of how difficult it can be to grow, it is also the most expensive type of lettuce sold in restaurants and you can expect the least amount of harvest if you grow it. With that being said, they can even grow in weather as low as 40 degrees! Gardeners do not have access to GMO seeds and organic seeds is a marketing term and not truly a type of seed. Hybrid seeds were made from combining the genes of the same group of plants. The earliest you can transplant your seedlings is two weeks before the last spring frost date. Lettuce is a hardy, cool-weather crop and can be planted with your earliest worked soil. This is the temperature needed so that your seeds can turn into plants. The priming process in pelleted lettuce seeds broadens the temperature range in which the seeds will germinate, overcoming some of their thermal dormancy. Prepare the area where you will be transplanting your seedlings. A variety's description followed by "MT0-30" indicates that the seed offered for sale has been tested for the presence of Lettuce Mosaic Virus and that no LMV was found in a sample of at least 30,000 seeds. Immediately after you transplant your lettuce outside add. The goal with hybrids is to produce a plant that contains the best features of both parent plants. It will do the lettuce seedlings much good. 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