column DIGGING IN
Lettuce be friends
JACKIE FRENCH is the author of The Chook Book (Aird Books). Her oldest chook, Gertie, is now 17. Although Gertie’s sisters have all long since fallen off the perch, Gertie still lays extremely large brown eggs most days of the year. Get in touch with Jackie via facebook. com/authorjackiefrench, twitter.com/jackie_french_ and instagram.com/jackie_ french_.
Treat your lettuces well and they will treat you to the most enormous, delicious and incredibly cheap harvest it is possible to have in your backyard.
Lettuces can be expensive or free. The free lettuce is the kind you grow yourself — but not from punnets. For some reason every snail in the neighbourhood knows when you have planted out a punnet of lettuce seedlings. You have brought supper for the snails.
Instead, plant lettuce seeds. Lettuce germinates in a week and grows fast, and “gone to seed” lettuces produce so many seeds that you get many in a packet, instead of the six to 12 seeds in packets of some other kinds of seeds. Make sure you don’t plant a hybrid variety (it will tell you if it is a hybrid on the packet) and let a lettuce go to seed next spring. Collect the seed in an old envelope. You now have the basis for free lettuces for the rest of your life, for you, your family, your friends.