Lots of lettuce

We love lettuce, but our hot southern summers won't allow it to grow when everything else it growing well. So we really look forward to spring and fall, when we can grow lettuce and eat salad a couple of times a day.

This is our current lettuce bed. We always grow "cut and come again" lettuce as opposed to head lettuce. This means that we can cut what we need for a salad, and it will grow right back almost immediately.

I don't remember what the varieties are, and it would take me a while to find the paper I wrote it down on. But the curly leaf lettuce in the front is some that we grew in the spring. We simply saved the seeds after it bolted and used them to replant in the fall. When this lettuce bolts (or flowers and goes to seed), we will do the same so we can plant it again in the spring. In this way, we will never have to buy seed again unless we just want another variety.

The lettuce on the left is a new variety for us. We bought some organic, heirloom seed and planted it, and it is doing great. Stuck in between the curly green leaves you can see a few red leaves. We grew red leaf lettuce last spring, too. But apparently we either didn't get as many seeds from it or it just didn't grow back as well. Hubby planted all the curly leaf lettuces together at random, and very few turned out to be red leaf.

This big bowl of freshly washed lettuce barley put a dent in our lettuce bed. But it made tasty salads for a couple of meals. Hubby likes his salad with broccoli, cauliflower, shredded cheese, banana peppers, green peppers, bacon and lots of ranch dressing. The lettuce is under there somewhere!