What you need to know.
Lettuce is a cool-season crop, and in North Carolina that means two growing windows: early spring (February through April) and fall (September through November). Our summers are simply too hot — lettuce bolts in the heat, sending up a bitter flower stalk, and the leaves turn sour and tough. Understanding this timing is the whole game with lettuce.
I grow loose-leaf types almost exclusively: Black Seeded Simpson, Oakleaf, and Salanova. These are cut-and-come-again varieties — you harvest the outer leaves and the plant keeps growing from the center, giving you weeks of harvests from a single planting. I also grow Buttercrunch (a small head type) because it is more heat-tolerant than most and gives me a few extra weeks before bolting.
"I planted lettuce on February 28th and had my first salad on March 22nd — three weeks from seed to plate. Nothing else grows that fast in early spring."
Step by step.
Direct sow seeds very shallowly — just a light covering of soil, barely an eighth of an inch deep. Lettuce seeds need light to germinate. Press the seeds gently into moist soil and keep the surface consistently damp until sprouting, which takes 5 to 10 days.
Succession plant every two weeks from late February through early April for spring, and from early September through mid-October for fall. Two-week successions mean you always have something ready to harvest instead of a glut all at once.
Harvest using the cut-and-come-again method: snip outer leaves about an inch above the soil level with scissors, leaving the central growing point intact. The plant regrows and you harvest again in another week or two. One planting can give you four or five harvests this way.
When to plant in Zone 7b.
In Zone 7b, start sowing lettuce as early as mid-February — it tolerates light frost without problem and actually prefers cool weather. The spring window runs roughly February through mid-April. After that, NC heat makes it bolt fast.
The fall window is September 1st through mid-October. Fall lettuce often tastes better than spring lettuce — slower growth in cooling temperatures produces sweeter, more tender leaves. I often leave fall plantings in the ground through December under a light row cover.
Problems I ran into.
Bolting is the main issue — when temperatures climb above 75 to 80 degrees consistently, lettuce shoots up a tall stalk and the leaves turn bitter almost overnight. Once it bolts there is no reversing it. Pull the plant and replant in fall. Heat-tolerant varieties like Jericho or Nevada buy a little extra time but not much.
Slugs eat lettuce at night, leaving ragged holes in leaves and silvery slime trails. I set out shallow dishes of beer near the plants — slugs are attracted to it and drown. It sounds funny but it actually works very well.
What I make with it.
A salad made from lettuce you picked twenty minutes ago is a completely different experience from bagged grocery store lettuce. The texture is crisper and the flavor is genuinely fresher. I eat garden lettuce with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt and nothing else.
Browse the recipes page for what I pair with lettuce from the garden — including the sugar snap pea salad, which layers fresh greens and peas in spring.