Corn salad

Lamb’s lettuce is a classic winter vegetable and stays in the ground outdoors. No lifting, no storing. From October to March you harvest the rosettes straight from the bed; in severe, lasting frost, cover it with fleece or brushwood and it stays harvestable.

You propagate lamb’s lettuce exclusively by sowing. Other methods are out of the question for this annual rosette plant. For the main crop, sow directly outdoors from mid-July to mid-September: draw shallow drills about 1 to 2 cm deep, space the seeds 5 to 10 cm apart and cover them with soil, then press the seed down gently. Lamb’s lettuce is a dark germinator and needs this soil contact to germinate. If you sow too shallow or leave the seeds uncovered, it germinates poorly. Keep the bed constantly moist for the first two to three weeks; in drought and heat it refuses to germinate. The ideal germination temperature is around 15 °C; in summer heat above 20 to 25 °C it hardly germinates, so sow in the cooler evening hours or shade it until it comes up. Germination takes a patience-testing 10 to 18 days. For a harvest from late autumn, sow at the end of July; for the winter harvest under fleece or in a cold frame, sow in mid-September. A spring sowing in March/April is also possible as soon as the soil stays above 5 °C. It gives a spring harvest, but tends to bolt as temperatures rise. If you want to save your own seed, let a few plants flower and stand in spring: the seeds ripen from the end of May / early June; then cut the plants off and dry them in a shallow crate so that the falling seeds are caught. Stored dry, they stay viable for 2 to 3 years. Open-pollinated varieties are best for this. F1 hybrids do not come true to type the following year.