Lettuce Is Not Growing
I love all things salad, so I grow a lot of lettuce to keep myself in supply.Unfortunately, you also run up against some prevalent lettuce problems that may wreck your harvest or at least cause you to throw much of it away.Over the years, I’ve learned many tricks of the trade to identify and deal with lettuce problems, which I’d love to share.Like most plants, lettuce suffers from few problems when the conditions are right, and the soil nutrients are plentiful.Read our detailed post on growing lettuce first as that will give you a great head-start.Most environmental lettuce problems are easy to prevent in advance if you have good planting practices and know what to look for.When lettuce grows a large flower head (or bolts to seed), it’s usually because of heat stress.I always presume the plant knows its days are numbered, so something triggers it to produce seeds to ensure it reproduces.If you live in a very sunny or hot area, provide shade, especially in the morning and the hottest part of the afternoon.Lettuce germination relies on the right temperature, so research what varieties grow well in your area.If the lettuce seedlings are still young and in pots, they may not have sufficient light, so they’re reaching up to the sun.If you aren’t seeing the growth you expected on your lettuce, you may have a number of problems on your hands.I’ve found that once lettuce starts to struggle early on, it finds it difficult to grow the rest of the season.Don’t plant your lettuce in cold, overly moist soil.For more tips, check out our guide on identifying and stopping this common fungal disease.Although yellowing of lettuce can be many other things like insufficient nutrients in the soil or too much or too little watering, I find fusarium wilt is often the culprit.This fungus is notoriously difficult to control on lettuce once it appears, but there are a couple of things you can do.First, carefully remove any infected leaves so that the fungus doesn’t spread.Next, remove some of the smaller lettuces in between the larger ones to allow more airflow and to stop the plants from touching each other.This is because when lettuce is damaged, a chemical reaction containing ethylene gas occurs.Read our article here on how to identify and control this common garden pest.I’m lucky that my area has no deer (or unlucky depending on how you look at it), but if you do, there is netting, landscaping methods, and planting techniques to keep them away.Talk to your neighbors about how they deter deer or check out our guide to deer-proofing your garden.Leave them overnight and in the morning, carefully dump the newspaper in a bucket of soapy water.Lettuce is one of the most common plants grown in the home vegetable garden because they are so easy to produce