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.

Salad Bowl Red

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 Lettuce

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

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12 Responses to Saturday Spotlight on Sunday – Salad Bowl Lettuce

  1. We grow red and green salad bowl and it looks really decorative – could be used as edging for an ornamental bed.

  2. Daphne says:

    I don’t think I’ve ever tried any type of salad bowl lettuce. I’ve been pretty boring in the lettuce department. I grow certain kinds that I like and tend not to try anymore out.

  3. Dave says:

    Salad Bowl is dependable for me here. I tend to grow the green one more than the red one, but both are good in my book. Those potted seedlings look great – and big enough to eat!

  4. Michelle says:

    My favorite lettuces tend to be heading types, romaine (cos) being tops, butterhead a close second, my experiment with iceberg worked pretty well this spring but they’re looking pretty bad now. All my head lettuces are bolting now, it’s time to plant something for summer, and your post makes me think I should dig out my Salad Bowl seeds. I think they are some of the prettiest lettuces around. No spotlight post from me this week, too busy switching beds from spring to summer plantings.

  5. Mark Willis says:

    My favourite cut-and-come-again type of lettuce is one called “Fristina”. It has a texture much crisper than Salad Bowl. It looks more like an Endive too. I also like a big pointy reddish one called “Cocarde”.

    • Liz says:

      I will have to look out for these. Fristina sounds really useful, all of my cut and come again lettuces are pretty soft.

  6. Balvinder says:

    I always grow romaine and salad bowl lettuce in containers, its looks pretty and very easy to grow.

  7. Sarah says:

    I grow red and green salad bowl, along with little gem and red iceberg… then compete with the slugs and hens over who gets to eat them first!

    • Liz says:

      I wish I could successfully grow iceberg lettuce. I love its texture and crunch but thus far I have failed to achieve any good heads.

  8. It may be due to lack of imagination but we always grow salad greens from a mix, though yours is one of my favorite of shapes!

    • Liz says:

      I grow a lot of lettuce mixes too – I think it is just easier, having said that I quite like making my own mixes from time to time.

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