Lettuce Picking... It's everywhere!

The garden is going crazy with lettuce! Lettuce here, lettuce there, lettuce in my dreams.. it’s everywhere!
If you haven’t already seen I started to create recipes with our lettuce harvest (hello fried rice!) so expect many more in the next couple of weeks!

I used to not like lettuce, it’s true. As a kid I was very picky when it came to that leafy green to the point of I would not touch a burger or sub that accidentally had lettuce on. I drove my parents insane. I stopped being this way just a few years ago when I realized lettuce is pretty darn good! So I’ve come a long way from not touching it with a fork to growing our own! We went a little crazy this year by planting a bunch of lettuce seeds that left us with a quite a few big heads of lettuce! Actually they’re massive.. seriously, wait till you see these bushy greens!

Let’s tell the story of our lettuce plants!
Lettuce seeds were planted on March 6 and transplanted outside on April 1.
Here’s a photo of them on April 1 getting ready to move outside!

We planted them into a 4×4 box.

And said good luck lettuce plants!

Lettuce starts off slow and then when a bit of heat comes it starts to go wild! We came home from a trip and the lettuce plant doubled in size. This was on May 1.

And this was on May 6, see how much it grew in just a few hot days?

May 9… still growing! Also note here that I stole a lettuce plant for dinner here and it was delicious!
I find that instead of cutting pieces of lettuce at a time it works best to just remove the entire plant at once. As soon as your plant gets bushy enough then you can pick it to eat or let it grow to it’s full size.

But first, we need to marvel one more time at the beauty of these lettuce plants. Sigh. Hello beautiful!

And here’s a few harvest photos..

After we picked a few individual plants we decided to go on one big lettuce picking afternoon date. The plants were pretty much at their maximum size as they were getting giant and with the upcoming heat I was worried they would start to bolt.

So then we yanked up all these big beautiful lettuce plants!

Goodness gracious lettuce plants, I’m so happy I got to see you grow this big!

And then we thought.. what the heck are we going to do with all these lettuce plants!

So we brought the lettuce downstairs and went on a wild lettuce meatball making night. In the end we ended up making more than 25 dinner meals that we froze with this lettuce (recipe coming in a week!). How awesome is that?