Lettuce Varieties We Love Growing

Five lettuce varieties we keep coming back to

They're not all the same kind of lettuce, and that's part of why we like this mix. Some stay compact and soft, some spread out with looser leaves, one brings a beautiful hit of red into the tower, and Mini Cos gives us that familiar cos crunch.

Salanova Butterhead Green

This is one we keep returning to. It forms a tidy rosette of soft green leaves and gives us exactly what we want from a lettuce growing close to the kitchen: plenty to pick without needing to harvest the whole plant straight away.

Kings Seeds describes Salanova Butterhead Green as a slow-bolting butterhead that produces lots of uniform individual leaves. That compact, multi-leaf habit is one of the reasons we find it so useful in the tower.

Salanova Butterhead Red

We grow this one partly because we like eating it, and partly because we like looking at it.

The deep red leaves break up all the green in a planted tower beautifully, while the plant still gives us the soft butterhead leaves and useful Salanova growth habit we enjoy.

Like the green variety, Kings Seeds describes Salanova Butterhead Red as slow bolting and producing a rosette of uniform leaves. We harvest it in much the same way: a few mature outer leaves as we need them, then the remainder when the plant is ready to make way for the next one.

Organic Salad Bowl Green

Salad Bowl Green has a completely different feel from the neat Salanovas. It's looser, frillier and looks wonderfully abundant once it gets going.

Kings Seeds describes it as a vigorous loose-leaf oakleaf variety with deeply lobed green leaves. For us, it's the sort of lettuce that invites you to walk past and take a few leaves for a sandwich or salad rather than waiting patiently for a finished head.

Oakleaf Green

Oakleaf Green earns its place because those distinctive lobed leaves give us another texture again. It looks different in the tower and feels different on the plate.

Kings Seeds describes this variety as slow bolting and suitable for year-round growing. We treat it much like Salad Bowl Green: once there's enough healthy growth, we take the mature outside leaves as we need them and leave the centre growing.

Eventually every lettuce reaches the point where we'd rather give the planting site to a fresh young plant. We don't keep a lettuce simply because it's still alive. The point, after all, is lettuce.

Mini Cos

Mini Cos lettuce tests our patience a little more.

It's a miniature cos, so rather than constantly picking from it, we usually leave this one alone long enough to form its compact upright head and then harvest the whole thing.

That gives us something quite different from the softer butterheads and loose-leaf varieties: firmer leaves, a crunchy centre and a proper little cos to take inside for dinner.

A couple more we're enjoying

Those five aren't the end of the story. We're always trying different lettuces, and two more we like growing are cut-and-come-again lettuce and Frisby.

Cut-and-come-again lettuce suits the way we naturally use the tower: pick the leaves you need, leave the plant growing, then come back for more. It's a useful option when you want a steady supply of fresh leaves rather than waiting to harvest a whole head.

Frisby is another variety we've enjoyed growing and one we'll keep growing alongside our regular favourites.

Why we pick lettuce little and often

We're generally too impatient to wait for every loose-leaf lettuce to reach its biggest possible size — and for home growing, we don't need to.

With Salanova, Oakleaf and Salad Bowl, we usually start taking mature outside leaves once the plant is established and has plenty of growth. We leave the younger centre leaves alone so the plant can keep producing.

It means the tower becomes something we harvest from regularly rather than something we wait weeks to harvest all at once.

Have the next lettuce growing before the old one comes out

This is one of the simplest ways we've found to keep fresh lettuce coming.

While we're picking from established plants in the tower, we'll have another small batch of seedlings coming along. When an older lettuce is finished, starts bolting, or simply isn't producing leaves worth keeping anymore, there's already a younger plant waiting to take its place.

You don't need a complicated planting calendar. Starting a few lettuce seeds at different times is enough to avoid every plant being ready and finished at once.

If you're growing your own from seed, our guide to starting seeds for your FlowGrow tower takes you through the process.

Don't want to wait for seeds?

You don't have to grow every lettuce from seed.

Garden centre seedlings are a great shortcut, and lettuce transplants particularly well into a FlowGrow tower. It's useful when you want to get growing quickly, or when you need a younger plant ready to replace one you've finished harvesting.

The important part is removing the potting mix before the plant goes into your tower. Gently loosen the soil from around the roots, rinse them thoroughly, then settle the clean roots into your FlowGrow planting sponge or rockwool and net cup.

Our guide to planting garden centre seedlings in your FlowGrow tower shows you exactly how we do it.

A note on lettuce and summer heat

Lettuce generally prefers cooler growing conditions. Even varieties described as slow bolting can become stressed when conditions get very warm.

If you're growing through a New Zealand summer, read our guide to keeping your hydroponic tower cool in summer.

Something we do after picking

If we're planning a salad later in the day, we'll often pick the lettuce from the tower beforehand and pop it into the fridge.

By the time we're ready to use it, the leaves are beautifully crisp and fresh.

There's good horticultural science behind this. Lettuce begins losing moisture after harvest, which eventually causes the leaves to soften and wilt. Cooling it promptly slows that moisture loss and helps maintain its crispness.

If your lettuce does become a little floppy, a short soak in very cold water can also help the leaves take up water again and regain some of their crispness.

Where we get our lettuce seeds

We buy many of the lettuce seeds we grow from Kings Seeds here in New Zealand. Their range gives us plenty to experiment with, and these five are varieties we've personally grown and enjoyed in our FlowGrow towers.

Seed ranges can change over time, so we prefer to choose the varieties we want to grow rather than treating any particular packet as essential. The useful part is understanding the type of lettuce you're planting and how you want to harvest it.

Frequently asked questions