Create Your Own Continuous Organic Lettuce Garden

Summer is here and I am excited about my lettuce garden that is just starting to sprout. For years, I have been using a continuous growing technique for my salad garden. When the lettuce is tall enough to pick, I just snip the ends off just like giving the lettuce a hair cut and make a baby green salad. This technique allows me to harvest lettuce for nearly 6 months!

My favorite method for growing my salad garden is to use raised bed planter boxes. I fill the boxes with organic compost and try to use only organic fertilizer. It's hard to be a purest knowing that I water that I use is city water. I do my best and hope that my lettuce garden will be free of contaminants.

After I lay down a nice foundation of organic compost, I scatter organic mesculin lettuce mix on the soil. Next, I water the seeds with a gentle shower. After the seeds are soaked, I add a 1/4 inch layer of potting soil over the seeds and water again.

I am not into individual lettuce plants.

Growing the lettuce garden is the easy part. Taking care of it and making the lettuce pest free is a continuous battle. Snails are the biggest enemy to my salad garden. They love the delicate tasty green lettuce leaves. I take this battle very serious. I use a cool pesticide called Sluggo Natural Slug Killer that breaks down into nitrogen after the snails snack on it. Just like a strong army that makes a perimeter around it's camp, I do the same thing with my lettuce garden. I make a perimeter of Sluggo to protect my prized leafy green lettuce.

If you want to keep your lettuce garden pest free, the Earth Box gardening system is another alternative. The entire planting area is covered with a layer of black plastic. The boxes are raised with a water reservoir in the bottom. They are virtually maintenance free. You can grow a lettuce garden with individual plants and use the hair cutting technique that I use in my planter boxes to give you continuous lettuce for months.