Thread: Lettuce Yields
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Old 09-14-2011, 05:43 AM
GpsFrontier GpsFrontier is offline
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Location: Lake Havasu AZ.
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Quote:
considering that I live in South Florida and therefore I've decided to grow in a climate controlled house, will that delay the onset of bolting?
Absolutely, if the climate control is done sufficiently you wont encounter bolting no mater what season it is in your area. Don't let the air temp into the 80's, and don't let the water temp get above that either and the plants will never experience conditions that would let them know they need to begin to reproduce. That's not to say that one degree difference and they will bolt, but that would be optimum conditions for lettuce so they wont be stressed.

Quote:
Secondly, how easy is it to get seed from lettuce and use it for the next planting? I would like to try harvesting seed at some point.
Personally I simply don't know. I have never made a point of trying to gather seeds from a lettuce plant. But considering you generally get hundreds/thousands in one pack of seeds that only cost a buck or two, it never occurred to me to try and harvest seeds from a lettuce plant (and it must not be hard to do if their that cheep).

P.S.
If you asked/or said I need to harvest 4 heads a week, and of what type of lettuce because larger heads like romaine lettuce take longer (if I remember correctly), I could give a much more detailed reply. But I don't want to do that just guessing how much you'll plan to consume. However I can tell you most leaf varieties of lettuce go from seedling to full grown (harvest) in about 6 weeks under the right conditions. And you can get "seed to harvest times" from the packaging (most of the time anyhow). Then it's just doing a little math once you know how much you'll be harvesting.

As an example:
One head harvested a week and a seed to harvest time of 6 weeks. You would want/need 6-8 heads already sprouted and growing at any given time in rotation. However like fintuckyfarms mentioned you don't need to pull the plant to have a salad. In witch case it's much harder to do the math because it comes down to how many leaves you harvest per plant, and how many plants you have able to have leaves harvested from.
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