Kitchen Garden

LETTUCE

As we move closer to equality between the sexes, I was surprised and amused to find in a seed catalogue a variety of lettuce called Drunken Woman. It apparently gets its name from the red tips of the lettuce leaves, supposedly reminiscent of the flushed cheeks of a woman who has had too much to drink. (Surely a man’s cheeks may be no less red when he is drunk…)

Drunken Woman aside, lettuce with reddish leaves is usually of a loose-leaf variety; other types include butterhead, crisphead and cos. Among the butterheads is Tom Thumb, with small, soft heads; the crispheads include Webbs Wonderful, the most popular of the icebergs. Cos lettuces seem to be

called Romaine when large and longleaved; when smaller, Little Gem, which used to be called Sugar Cos, is a favourite.

Little Gem and Tom Thumb can be sown this month under glass, then planted out in April. For all lettuce varieties, sow little and often and keep well watered, to avoid too many maturing at once and bolting, especially during a dry summer. Once a lettuce starts to bolt, when the centre opens up and grows upwards, the leaves will become bitter and unusable.

Having had a few failures with earlysown lettuce, whether under glass or in open ground, I now concentrate on a cutand-come-again variety such as Salad Bowl, green- or red-leaved, which has no heart and is unlikely to bolt from a late sowing. The loose-leaf lettuce I sowed in early August was still providing us with plenty of salad well into December.

The one iceberg type that I did grow last year with some success was Reine de Glace (from Sarah Raven). It was sown in midsummer and we started picking two months later to avoid any risk of its flowering. If you want to try a selection of lettuces from one seed packet, sowing every two weeks, look for D T Brown’s Headed Mixed containing eight varieties, which will mature at different times.