January, 2010
A cold snap frosted Horsetail Haven, a home garden in Austin, Texas
but the garden still is growing

Lactuca serriola, often called prickly lettuce or compass plant, is well known to Texas gardeners who frequently pull it from their yards and vegetable plots and toss it on compost piles.  It is an easily removed “weed” but occasionally the milky sap may cause skin irritation.  For centuries before we began eating lettuce salads the bitter sap from prickly lettuce was collected for medicinal use.  Hippocrates (born 460 BC) knew that the juice of Lactuca induced sleep.  It is reported to have been used in combination with other herbs for stomach problems and cough. It has been used in beer brewing (see Stephen Buhner’s Sacred & Herbal Healing Beers for a recipe) and may be used by modern herbalists as a sedative and expectorant.  Prickly lettuce is edible but boiling with 2 or 3 water changes is recommended in order to remove the bitter, acrid taste.

Fortunately for lettuce lovers, sweet, mild Lactuca sativa varieties with very low levels of the bitter medicinal compounds have been developed in a variety of shapes and colors that make salad nibbling a joy.  Three general forms are easily grown in Austin.  First are the leaf lettuces.  They form a loose rosette of leaves that can be picked individually as needed.  It seems that the more you pick the more they grow.  Ann Marie often plants mixtures of seeds available from seed companies but especially loves the oak leaf forms and red varieties such as ‘Red Sails’ and ‘Merlot’  mixed in with more conventional green growing ‘Black Seeded Simpson’.  She has observed that the darker red types grow more slowly than the solid green forms.

A second type of lettuce that belongs in an Austin garden are the Romain or Cos form with elongated upright leaves and succulent ribs.  Here Ann Marie’s favorite is ‘Flashy Trout Back’. This is a gorgeous and tasty lettuce with deep red speckles on bright green leaves.  The Origins of Fruits and Vegetables by Jonathan Robbers indicates that this is a descendent of Aleppo lettuce, known to have been grown in Syria at least as early as the 17th century and probably much earlier.

The third lettuce form essential to an Austin garden are butterhead or bibb.  They have large, ruffled leaves arranged in loose heads and may be harvested leaf by leaf or as a whole head.  Their flavor is delicate and very sweet.  ‘Buttercrunch’ and ‘Merveille de Quatre Saisons’ are favorites at Horsetail Haven.  Crisphead types of lettuce such as the ‘Iceberg’ don't grow well in an Austin climate, but with all these other marvelous types, who needs them!

Lettuce can be direct seeded into loose garden soil, but Ann Marie starts hers in pots beginning in late September and continuing monthly through February.  The young plants are transplanted to vegetable and flower beds as the summer garden dies.  They are fertilized every two weeks unless the weather falls below freezing.  Lettuce can survive frost, but if predictions are for temperatures below 25 degrees F. the plants are covered.  Picking usually begins in December.  Ann Marie has not grown lettuce through an Austin summer, but has heard of people who have had success growing in the shade or under row cover.