Lettuce entertain you
Salad days are here again. Lettuce is a typical crop for early spring gardens, and some varieties are ready in 45 days or less, so by mid-May it’s time for the first salads from the garden. April, the cruelest month, throws us late cold spells to negotiate, and May can be vicious also, but with care lettuce can persevere and thrive in the cool, damp weather we’ve had lately.
If you like lettuce, save a kind thought for third century BC Egyptians who grew it to make oil from the seeds but later bred it for tastier leaves. Lettuce seed oil was used, among other things, for mummification. Greeks took lettuce to Europe and Christopher Columbus brought it to our hemisphere.
Romans served lettuce with olive oil and vinegar 2000 years ago, so I’m not the culinary genius I thought. They also attributed powers of sexual potency to it, so I’m not… never mind. Anglo-Saxons found the white sap in the ribs and stalk of wild lettuce to be a mild narcotic. Clever humans will find a narcotic if it is there to be found.
Romans called the plant lactuca from which we derived the modern name.
Because Chinese tradition was to avoid raw vegetables, farmers there developed lettuce with a thick main stalk to be used in soups and stir-fries. The stem form of lettuce is known in America as celtuce.
There are four main types of lettuce: romaine, iceberg, looseleaf, and butterhead. Thomas Jefferson’s slaves grew 20 or so varieties of lettuce including Brown Dutch, a looseleaf variety still grown and one of the oldest heirlooms available. They also grew a smaller variety of butterhead lettuce developed by Kentucky farmer Jack Bibb. Now you know where we got the name for Bibb lettuce.
Romaine is a tall variety with longer, crisper leaves. It presumably came from the Greek island of Cos, hence the name Cos lettuce, and then through Rome, hence the name romaine. This variety can withstand heat better than other varieties, but all lettuces prefer cooler weather. One colorful romaine is called Forellenschluss, which translates as “speckled like a trout.”
Butterheads form loose heads surrounded by loose succulent leaves. Partial shade is best for them, and colors range from pale greed to almost purple. One heirloom variety from France, Sanguine Ameliore, is almost white with scarlet splashes. Nature is incredible with its colors.
Looseleaf varieties prefer cooler temperatures, but clever breeders have created some that are more heat tolerant. Oakleaf is a variety that was exceptional in my garden – very succulent, plus more tolerant of Arkansas weather changes. Black-seeded Simpson matures in 45 days and has been a reliable choice since the 19th century. Merlot is a very dark red variety, and other varieties are green speckled with red.
Looseleaf and butterhead varieties were the traditional homegrown varieties for centuries but they were better suited for local markets, not travel. Iceberg lettuce forms a dense head like cabbage and therefore endured being hauled distances in refrigerated train cars. It was the main grocery store lettuce for most of the 20th century until health-conscious hippies in the ‘60s brought focus back to more nutritious choices.
My attempt to grow iceberg lettuce in northern California resulted in ideal living quarters for earwigs. This was in the same county Luther Burbank called “the chosen spot of all this earth as far as Nature is concerned.” Maybe in his time earwigs were still on earwig wagon trains heading west and had not found his gardens yet, but they found mine.
Lettuces are packed with vitamins K & A and each plant will self-sow if you let it, so saving seeds is easy. Above all, it is easy to grow. Thich Nhat Hanh stated, “When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce.”