Photo courtesy of kerryank at Flickr.com.
Seeds don’t cost much, but their price can add up season after season. If you’re self reliant and frugal, the best way to get your seeds is to harvest your own! That way, you can also ensure the quality of the seeds you use year after year. You can also guarantee that your seeds are free from pesticides or chemicals.
Looking for an easy seed to get started with? Lettuce grows quickly, is a great accessory to any meal, and pollinates itself. Lettuce is fat free, low in calories and has no saturated fat. It’s a great source of vitamin A and folic acid. It can also be helpful in losing weight and curing insomnia; lettuce induces feelings of sleepiness and sated appetite when eaten at the end of a meal.
So, how do I grow my own lettuce seeds?
Lettuce is a flowering plant, and those flowers are key. You can harvest leaves from the plant throughout the year to eat, but the lettuce will get increasingly bitter as it begins to flower. Lettuce produces clusters of tiny flowers that come and go in the blink of an eye. These lettuce flowers will be open for only a short time – as little as 30 minutes – so it’s easy to miss their appearance.
If your lettuce is growing like crazy but hasn’t flowered, then you may want to use a razor blade to make a shallow cut across the top of the head. A shallow cut of two or three inches is all it takes to encourage flowering. There are many different types of lettuce, and even though their flowers are open for very short periods of time, cross-breeding can occur.
After lettuce flowers, it will form stalks with seeds at the top. This process is called bolting. After your lettuce bolts, put a bag or around the seeds to keep birds away and give the seeds time to dry. When the stalks are completely dry, cut and thrash the bolts to separate the chaff. Put the seeds away in a cool, dry location until you’re ready to plant again.
That’s it – harvesting lettuce seeds is about as easy as harvesting peas and only slightly harder than harvesting tomato seeds.
Photo courtesy of ylan322 at Flickr.com.
