Saturday Spotlight on Sunday – Salad Bowl Lettuce

I was wondering what to highlight this week when I noticed my lettuce seedlings which I have been growing on in pots before planting out.  The Salad Bowl Red were looking particularly good and so they are this weeks spotlight.

I like growing Salad Bowl lettuce.  It comes in both red and green forms – imaginatively called Salad Bowl Red and Salad Bowl Green respectively.  I grow both forms and enjoy both throughout the year.  Whether I grow red or green at any one time depends on what other lettuce varieties I am growing more than anything else.  I like to grow a range of colours and leaf shapes at any one time.

Salad bowl is a classic cut and come again lettuce variety with wide rosette shaped heads when fully grown.  You can harvest the leaves as you need them and the plant replenishes them quickly.  They are slower to bolt in warm weather than some varieties and have a nice mild lettuce flavour.

Salad Bowl can be grown year round in Melbourne.  I start my lettuce in seed trays, potting them up when they get two true leaves and planting them out when the seedlings are a decent size.  I do it this way for two reasons:

1. It limits the time the plants are unproductive in the beds.
2. They are much better able to resist slugs, snails, scratching birds etc when the plants are larger.

I struggle with some lettuces, iceberg comes to mind, but I find that salad bowl grows easily for me with few issues and irritations.  What is your favourite easy to grow lettuce?

Saturday Spotlight is a series of posts highlighting particular varieties of edible plants.  If you have a favourite, or even a less than successful variety of a plant and would like to include it in the series then please leave a comment with a link below.    I have created a page (above, just below the header) with an Index of all the Spotlights to date.   I will add links to any new posts below and in next weeks post as well as ensuring they appear in the Index.  

New Spotlights last week were:

Verde da Taglio Chard – Our Happy Acres

Watercress – From Seed to Table

and from this week:

Mini Wombok – Garden Glut

Butterfly Pea – Kebun Malay-Kadazan Girls