Two Feet in the Dirt

After a fun night awake with a baby with stomach flu, I got out as early as I could this morning to harvest the first of the spring mix! It’s important to harvest lettuce as early in the day as possible to keep the bitterness down. Surprisingly, lettuce contains latex, in the form of that milky liquid that leaks out of the stem when cut. At night, lettuce plants pull much of the latex down into their roots. As the sun rises and the heat of the day increases, the bitter latex is gradually sent back up into the leaf, explaining why lettuce harvested earlier in the day tends to be sweeter. After cutting less than a quarter of the small patch I planted three weeks ago, we have a big bowl of lettuce ready for my mom to make into one of her famous salads while she visits this week! Best of all, baby lettuce greens are a cut-and-come-again crop, meaning that, as long as you cut above the point in the stem from which the leaves are growing, you’ll be able to get multiple harvests from the same planting.