Fresh greens are always relevant: who will refuse a portion of a juicy salad with vegetables? Moreover, if its ingredients are grown with their own hands in their own country house! The basis of such a dish can be leaf lettuce, which is easy to grow on the garden bed. Nevertheless, one cannot sow seeds alone: you need to choose the right soil, maintain water balance and have time to harvest lettuce in time. Growing lettuce in the open ground (planting and care) - this is what our latest publication is about!
How to pick up lettuce seeds?
For planting in the garden, you can choose any salad sold in garden stores. But still, before buying seeds, it is better to consult with neighbors growing this green: they can tell which varieties are better established in your conditions.
Of great importance is the quality of the seeds. There can be a lot of them in a pack, but if at the same time the seeds are old or weak, then you will not wait for friendly seedlings. So, ideally, buying seeds is not from resellers, but from summer residents, for whom a hobby has turned into a profession. Usually contacts of fans of summer residence can be found in gardening magazines.
If you are not sure about the seeds, they should be treated with a potassium permanganate solution before sowing for better germination. It should be weak - light pink. In a bowl with a solution, place the seeds for 15 minutes: after that they can be considered ready for sowing in the ground and fortified with potassium permanganate.
When can I sow a salad?
In this matter a lot depends on your climate and weather conditions prevailing on the site. However if you have greenhouseYou can sow lettuce seeds in it as early as February - along with the seeds of radish, early carrots and kohlrabi. Already after 50 days (that is, in the early to mid-April) you can get the first crop of greenhouse salad.
As for planting lettuce in the open ground, it’s also not worth tightening: you can sow seeds in April, while the land is still wet, and there are no weeds on the bed.
Salad Preferences
Any leafy plants (and lettuce here is no exception) need access to the sun. It is from the sun's rays that they receive the energy necessary for the development of leaves. So the ideal bed of lettuce should be located in the sun or in light partial shade. Lettuce sown in the shade will sprout and even “grow” the root, but you won’t get any juicy and crisp leaves from it.
Earth loves friable salad. Therefore, it is important to dig a bed in the autumn, on which you plan to sow salad in the spring. Before sowing, it’s good to fertilize the soil with compost or add mineral fertilizers to the ground (50 g per 1 sq. M of beds).
How to grow lettuce in open ground
1. On the bed, make furrows at a distance of about 15 cm from each other. The depth of the furrows should be small - 3-4 cm is enough. Pour the grooves with water so that the ground is ready to take the seeds and let them grow.
2. Sprinkle lettuce seeds (dry or wet - processed with potassium permanganate) into these recesses so that they are not placed too close to each other.
3. Truss furrows with a small layer of earth: first wet and then dry. Dry land during sowing plays the role of mulch - it protects the bed from the rapid evaporation of moisture.
4. In a week or two (the weather plays an important role), lettuce shoots appear on the bed. When there are 3-4 leaves in the bushes, the furrows need to be thinned out - pull out the extra bushes, leaving only the strongest at a distance of about 7 cm from each other.If you do not have time to thin out the furrows, the bushes will grow underdeveloped (they will have to share all the nutrients from the soil among themselves).
5. Further care consists only in watering. Do not try to water the salad bed with a hose! Firstly, the jet will break fragile leaves, and secondly, from cold water (which usually flows from the hose in the country house), lettuce leaves will become bitter. It is better to water the salad twice a week with a watering can: from such watering, the leaves will bend slightly to the ground, but not break.
6. You can harvest lettuce already when 5 leaves appeared on the bush. Well, if the bush has already released an arrow (the same leaves, but raised on a high stalk), it is not worth collecting this for food: it will have a bitter taste and a minimum of useful substances.
Now you know how to grow a salad in the country, in general it is not so difficult. The sun, water and nutritious light soil - that’s all you need for the full development of this delicious plant!
It will not be amiss to know how to grow green peas in the country.
