On May 23, 8:35 am, "Him" wrote:
Hi - for the first time I am this year growing lettuce in my garden. I
bought some head lettuce plants and all is ok. I also bought some of what I
thought were leaf lettuce plants but now I am not sure. As a kid I remember
my Dad growing leaf lettuce in a row and just snipping it off to collect it
and it grew back ... that is what I was after.

What I got is called Salad Bowl ... some are red and some are green color.
How do I harvest these? Do they form a head and then get cut and done or
can I cut the leaves and they grow back?

Thanks for your ideas and help.

I don't grow head lettuce, but I do exactly what you're describing
with Romaine and Grand Rapids -- snip what I need and let the plant
keep growing. It doesn't grow back, per se, but it kind of grows on a
spine, and the plant will keep growing and producing more leaves if
you do this.

In the end, it may or may not yield any more lettuce than if I had
left the plants alone, but it does make a nice way to harvest fresh
lettuce in the quantities you need. Not a lot of waste, and always
fresh.

By the way, depending on how serious you are (I am not at all), when
the lettuce turns bitter I let the plants keep growing. They grow
very tall and bolt in somewhat spectactular fashion. This year, the
seeds that yielded resulted from last year's plants grew into four new
lettuce plants that materialized completely on their own. Nature is
amazing.

Good luck.
Chris