"Terryc" wrote in message
...
that sounds lovely! most of what i know about lettuce was gleaned through
failure, not success g

That is(hopefully was) our normal situation. We have limited success
raising seedlings and planting them out. Seem to be have a lot more
success just scattering/broadcasting the seed and see what comes up.

i can well imagine, see below.

It all started with a wrong compost. It just doesn't get the heat and kill
the seeds. So borage, tomatoes, capsicum, pumpkins etc survive and sprout
every time we spread some around.

Then what few lettuce seedlings survived bolted to seed (just like
coriander is doing now, sigh) and we just left all the seed heads in this
area.

ooh, jackie french would LOVE you ;-)

i don't mind a bit of jackie french myself (in small doses) so what it looks
like is happening there is that the strong hardy ones who consider
themselves in a good location will just carry on - the duds will die & you
won't necessarily notice. i suppose the half-duds live, but bolt. if and
when you interfere, you might not be actually improving anything (in the
plant's view - if you could say plants have a "view"). i'm really trying not
to be such an anal micro-manager for this reason - i'm just noticing that my
interference just isn't necessarily any use unless i know from experience
i'm doing good interference, not just trying to bend the plants to my will.
i'm trying to keep in mind what seem to be contributing factors - e.g. i put
up a rock to shade one spinach plant, only to discover stored heat from the
rock is causing it to die. it's neighbour plant which in my anal
micro-manager opinion gets "too much sun", is as happy as a clam. so, what
do i know? i don't! the spinach does, though, so i've decided to listen to
them. and i'll put rocks up for plants that like warmth, not for shade, duh!

We have a patch of english spinach that is all the spinach that popped up
everywhere else and was transplanted. Alas, all but 2 plants have
magnificent sead heads already.

Currently, we have one bed 10'x4' that I'm broadcasting various old seeds
(capsicum, spinach, lettuce and whatever else I find that we have
collected in the seed collection) onto, I'll scratch the surface, water
and sit back and see what happens. it seems to work better, than purchased
or raised seedlings/

i bet it does. i wouldn't mind an update in a few months! i raise a lot of
seedlings these days, it's certainly a totally different thing to what
you're going to do with that bed. it's extremely artificial, in many ways &
i suspect the artificiality leads to problems down the track.
kylie