When to harvest lettuce?

[newsmyrnastead]

This is my first year growing lettuce, and I've got some growing in a pot with peppers, and some in my garden. When is the right time to harvest the lettuce? I picked off a few leaves but inside the middle of the leaf stem there's a white liquid and it doesn't taste too pleasant. Also, another strain of lettuce I have going started flowering at the top of it, is this normal? Is it getting too hot?

 

[lesa]

If it is flowering, you are probably too late. Lettuce is usually pretty early or it will be bitter (and go to seed-which it sounds like some of yours is doing.) Not sure about the white liquid? Sorry.

 

[patandchickens]

Alas, you're too late. When they start to get obvious white latex-y sap, and taste bitter, and begin *at all* to bolt, they are unavoidably bitter and going to die soon anyhow.

Next time round, start harvesting leaves from your lettuces as soon as they are big enough to be able to stand losing a few. It is really much more useful, and you get a bigger harvest overall, to take a leaf or two from each plant every day or two or three, on an ongoing basis, than to wait til the plant is as big as it's going to get before turning bitter and then harvest the whole head. If you do it the first way, you have a supply of fresh succulent lettuce over weeks or even months depenidng on your weather and the lettuce variety. Whereas if you wait and cut off the whole plant when it's mature, you will have no lettuce at all for a long time, then a very brief massive glut of lettuce you can't eat before it spoils

BTW, lettuce can also get bitter long before maturity if it is allowed to dry out, even just once. You ahve to keep it really evenly reliably watered for good sweet leaves. Sometimes this can surprise you if you buy store-boughten transplants instead of seeding your own, b/c you don't know what treatment they had before you bought them. A surreptitious taste-test at the garden center, if you are confident they keep nasty sprays away from the veggie display, helps avoid most but not all problems.

Better luck next time, at least you got to enjoy them as an ornamental ,

Pat, whose main crop of lettuce is just 'turning' now and probably only has another couple days before becoming totally inedible and going to the chickens