Most of the Southeast, it’s a challenge to find good production of lettuce during the summer. We get a couple of cool weeks in early spring before the heat sets in, and our lettuce gets mushy and bitter. In years like this, when hot, dry weather continues, fall production can be a challenge, too. Thankfully, winter lettuce production is surprisingly easy.
Although lettuce is technically not as hardy as others of hard greens, you can still produce good lettuce with a bit of proper protection and care.
Lettuce Season Extension
In some parts of the Deep South, you run away from the lettuce growing in the field without additional protection. However, lettuce is incredibly frost tolerant, so in many places, you need to provide additional frost protection.
Unheated greenhouses, cold frames, and high tunnels provide maximum protection while still providing plenty of sunlight. These are perfect for the hilly areas there extreme cold protection is required.
That said, you can get away with affordable and accessible options. Row cover and bottom tubes made of clear plastic and wire hooks can provide cheap, easy to install how to extend the season. Be aware that low tunnels and line covers can reduce air flow, which can encourage pest and disease problems, so it’s important to stay alert and open them when possible.
In vin cold temperatures, you can combine these two methods. You can use a row cover to provide additional security for growing lettuce in high tunnels and greenhouses.
Winter lettuce seedlings growing in a low tunnel
Lettuce Earth Needs
Lettuce is often considered an easy crop, but like any crop, it will perform best in good soil conditions, especially in winter. It grows best in well-drained soil with a pH between 6.0 and 6.5.
It often comes as a surprise to new gardeners, but lettuce is a difficult food to grow it grows very fast. It benefits from soil rich in minerals and organic matter, so amending your soil with compost before planting is a good idea. And you want to consider this when planning your cover crops and crop rotations.
Especially if you have struggled with lettuce in the past, a soil test is a great tool that will allow you to amend your soil properly.
Lettuce seeds
In the Southeast, we can get away with planting lettuce very late in the fall. You can continue direct seeding as long as your soil temperature needs to be above 32°F. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll get faster growth.
Cold temperatures, cloudy days, rain, snow, and limited daylight can affect lettuce growth. It may feel like your lettuce isn’t growing at all. It is not unusual for lettuce to take up to 30 days or more to mature in the winter. Getting seeds in the ground in the fall helps with winter harvest. Additionally, you will begin to see faster growth as the days grow longer in February and spring.
When sowing your winter lettuce, plant the seeds about 1/4 inch deep. The space you need for because the rows of lettuce depend what the size you intend to harvest your lettuce of.
Usually, when we harvest lettuce in the winter, we harvest it as a baby vegetable. This means we get to enjoy the harvest early. It also protects the lettuce. Young lettuce is more frost tolerant and cold tolerant than mature heads. For a baby lettuce harvest, you can get away with 4-inch row spacing, but closer to 12 inches for mature heads is appropriate.
You can also grow lettuce. Planting is a great way to keep succession going, start seeds quickly, and fill in any gaps in your cold frame, hoop house, or other bed throughout the winter.
Caring for Winter Lettuce
Winter lettuce tends to be a little looser than spring lettuce, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to treat. Weed pressure is less in the winter, but you should remove any weeds in the fall as these can harbor pests and diseases.
You should continue to water the lettuce in the winter. Because it is slow growing, winter lettuce has low moisture requirements but still needs occasional watering to keep the soil moist in shallow trenches, cold frames, greenhouses, and elevated tunnels.
It is important to keep water off the leaves when watering, as this can cause frost problems. Water Lettuce down. Drip irrigation or soaker hoses are suitable.
You also want to keep your lettuce from overheating and provide good air circulation whenever possible. On warm and hot days, remove the high tunnels, cold frames, greenhouses, and lower tunnels whenever possible.
Despite the cooler temperatures, pests and diseases can still play a role in winter lettuce production, in part because of the low air flow and humidity associated with season extension devices. Watch out for pests like aphids, caterpillars, and whiteflies, as well as fungal diseases such as powdery mildew, damping off, and low rot and bacterial diseases such as soft rot.
A variety of lettuce for winter production
When choosing lettuce for the winter garden, you might want to choose varieties that are different from what you usually choose for planting gardens in the Southeast. Cold-hardiness and disease resistance is very important in time for winter production.
Here are a few of our favorites:
Harvesting Winter Lettuce
As mentioned above, harvesting your winter lettuce as baby greens is fine. If possible, harvest lettuce when the leaves are dry and gently cut the leaves with scissors or a knife. Especially when it’s cold, lettuce is easy to damage.
You can store lettuce in the refrigerator, but for best results, we recommend harvesting just before you’re ready to eat.t.
You can grow lettuce all winter long in the Southeast using a few basic techniques. Keep growing this winter, and enjoy fresh, clean salads!
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