Since it’s starting to get hot outside and we want to be sure that we have lots of lettuce around when the tomatoes are ready, how do we cool our gardens down to ensure a continuous lettuce harvest? For starters, I always think it’s a good idea to keep the sun off your lettuce. Even if it’s under 80 degrees. But you’ll definitely want to keep the sun off your lettuce if it’s over 80. Somewhere between 80-85 degrees is where lettuce has a very hard time germinating. You have a couple of options. The first is to start your lettuce seeds inside-where it’s cool, and then transplant them outside when they’re ready. This is a great way to do it and to ensure a continuous harvest all summer. But it does require a little more work on your part. The other way is to direct seed right into the garden soil. When you’re hot what do you need? A little more water, and you sure could go for some extra shade. It’s the same thing with lettuce. If you cover it and give it a little more water, you’ll be able to grow lettuce all summer long-right through the hottest part of the year. You can see how I do it with this picture of shade cloth. I have it draped over the lettuce and it’s attached to my PVC ribs by large binder clips. One of these days I’m going to put a thermometer under there to see how much cooler it actually is under the shade. I know it’s significant enough to enable me to grow my lettuce all summer long. You can buy shade cloth at a lot of garden supply stores such as Lowe’s or Home Depot. It comes in a large roll. I end up cutting the roll into pieces to fit my garden needs. As mentioned earlier, I try to keep the hot sun off my lettuce even when it’s not overly hot. Try this little experiment yourself when the temperature is over 80 and also again when it’s under 80 degrees. Cover some of your lettuce with shade cloth while you leave other lettuce uncovered. Then come out and look at them at the end of the day when it’s time to snip salad for dinner. Although the lettuce that’s uncovered will be ok, you’ll notice that the covered lettuce is more crip, not wilted at all, and fresh looking. Your uncovered lettuce will be less colorful, dry, and slightly wilted-maybe very wilted if it’s really hot. That’s why I cover mine. What if you don’t have the money to buy shade cloth? No problem-use an old bed-sheet. Make sure it’s white or light yellow in color though, as a darker colored fabric will heat up your garden.[ois skin=”below post”]

Lettuce, lettuce, lettuce.  All kinds of lettuce-like 12 different varieties.  Imagine being able to go out in your square foot garden-where you have 4 heads in each square-snipping a little of this variety, a little of that variety, a little bit of spinach, and maybe some cuttings of Swiss chard.  Even more, you can vary the look of your garden by choosing different colors.  Not just green, and not just red, but those that are both colors all in one.  You can buy rainbow lights-a variety of Swiss chard that comes up in 4 different colors.  It would be virtually impossible to have the same tasting salad every night with this kind of variety.  Of course, the trick is to have your lettuce around when those tomatoes are ready.  That’s a little bit of a trick, but we will talk about that in another post.  We are huge fans of Caesar’s salad so we grow quite a bit of romaine-in different varieties.  You can get a feel for how packed in these plants are in this picture.  It’s not over planted, but there is no wasted space in a square foot garden.  And because of that, it’s difficult for weeds to find a place to land and grow.  There are two ways of harvesting in the SFG system.  One-pull the whole head of lettuce when it’s ready.  Two-cut the outer leaves of this one, that one, etc.  When you do it this way they will continue to grow back.  There will come a time when their worn out, and that’s when you pull the whole thing and toss it into the compost unit.  We just pulled 16 heads of lettuce last night.  That will last us a while.[ois skin=”below post”]

we teach square foot gardening. I wrote an ebook, in part, because of the vast amount of bad information that is floating around out there about square foot gardening. It’s amazing to read and it’s all over the place. This is an example of that. We had a great article about square foot gardening in one of the local papers yesterday. I read it and then saw some of the comments. There was a lot I could talk about but this one will do. Here is what it said: “I also think that the claim that most things only grow in the first 6 inches of soil is inaccurate. Here is a link that discusses root depth (among other things) of common garden vegetables. Most have a tap root longer than 6 inches within 3 weeks of planting! Do you really think you are going to be able to maximize your garden production by stunting the growth of your roots so early on?” How does that old saying go? “A picture is worth a thousand words?” Well, then here you go. This is a picture of 4 perfect heads of lettuce that grew in a 6″ container of Mel’s mix. End of story. We have pictures at the foundation of plants that are 8 feet tall which have been grown in 6″ of soil. Here’s the real problem. Folks who think like this(he’s a master gardener by the way!)have been trained in the university agricultural methods. That’s great-for farming! Not so much for us backyard gardeners. The reason he thinks this way? Simple. In the agricultural courses your taught that you’ve got to have these long tap roots. And you do! The reason why is that these old farming lands have been stripped of much of the nutrients and trace elements(despite all their efforts to amend their soil with manure in the off-season)and these roots have to keep going down, down, down in order to hunt for food(nutrients)and water. The reason why it works in 6″ of Mel’s mix is that everything you need is right there! No need for big tap roots! No need for plants to keep going down in order to find nutrition and water. Our gardens are at least 33% compost while the typical farm land is less than 5%. Therein lies the big difference. So, don’t be intimidated by your master gardener friends. Mel wrote his book and found that the experts, as a general rule, all came to the conclusion that square foot gardening couldn’t work because it’s too easy. And, their right-it is easy…..

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