Growing Lettuce

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

You can pamper yourself with fresh lettuce leaves throughout the summer season. These greens are happy to pick up the baton in the vacated areas or until later crops have emerged. And the harvest can be obtained very soon. However, the salad is not as simple as it might seem, and caring for it also has its own subtleties and wisdom

Sowing lettuce

Caring for a salad can seem time-consuming in the sense that its seedlings need to be thinned out. And if sown too rarely, individual seeds may not germinate. However, such a hassle as thinning can be avoided if you take care of the pre-sowing preparation of the seeds in advance. This will help enrich them with trace elements and increase germination.

To begin with, the seeds need to be soaked for a day. It is better to do this not in a container, flooding with water, but wrapping them in damp gauze on a saucer. The effect will be more noticeable if you use not ordinary clean water, but an infusion of ash. To prepare it, you will need 2 tables. l. fertilizer for half a glass of warm water. The solution is allowed to brew for two days.

When used for soaking, the infusion is filtered. The fact that the procedure was successful is indicated by the swollen seeds that have increased in size. They should be slightly dried just before sowing.

The optimal precursors for salad will be pumpkins, cucumbers, zucchini. Sowing holes are made up to 2 cm deep at a distance of about 7 cm for leafy varieties and about 8 cm for semi-cabbage varieties. Cabbage varieties need a space of up to 20 cm. Row spacings for leafy ones are left on the garden bed by 20 cm, and half-cabbage and cabbage varieties - 30 cm each. Seeds are laid out in 1-2 pieces.

You can take empty spaces with lettuce on the beds where carrots and parsnips have not yet grown. Sowing seeds of head lettuce can be carried out next to the beds where the tomato seedlings are located.

With a thickened sowing, you can get several cuts of lettuce in a short time. For this, the sowing of seeds is carried out at a distance of 2.5 cm, the aisles are measured by 10 cm. The cutting of greens is done at a level of 3-4 cm from the ground. In a few weeks, a new crop of vitamin greens will ripen here.

Growing lettuce through seedlings

The method by which sowing seeds is carried out at room conditions is called semi-seedling. For this, the seeds are immersed in a container with nutritious soil mixture and crushed with a thin layer of earth. It will take a little less than a week for the cotyledons to appear on the surface. By this time, grooves must be prepared in the garden, where these delicate seedlings will be moved in whole bunches. The grooves are made up to 3.5 cm deep, the aisles are left at 15-20 cm. The seedlings are removed from the container with a spoon along with a lump of earth and placed on the beds. After that, they are completely crushed by the earth. They remove greens from the beds directly from the roots and immediately use them for food.

Protection against diseases and pests

Juicy lettuce leaves to taste not only for humans, but also for many parasites. And so that the efforts of the gardener are not in vain, you need to take care to protect your plantings.

Aphids can settle on the leaves. Treating the salad with a decoction of tomato tops will help to avoid such guests. To do this, 0.5 kg of raw materials will require 1 liter of water. Tomato leaves are poured with boiling water and insisted for at least 5 hours. After that, the infusion must be boiled and 2 tablespoons added to it. l. crushed soap.

To prevent the wireworm from getting close to the roots of plants, baits are made for them. For this purpose, pieces of potatoes or carrots are hidden around the beds every 1.5 m to a depth of 5 cm. You need to install beacons in order to dig up vegetables with larvae later and remove them away from your garden.

In the fight against slugs, quicklime helps. On the way to the coveted garden bed, mollusks do not want to overcome even the thin path of this substance.