Winter Lettuce - Spotlight on All-Season Gem Lettuces

Head lettuce, in our southern Victorian, cold, wet, frosty July, can turn to mush. In the 2020 - 2021 growing season, we trialed our entire lettuce collection, experimenting with seasonal sowing windows and protected and not protected positions. We discovered that GEM LETTUCES are remarkable in that they thrive in both cold season/short daylight and hot season/long daylight.

For winter lettuce, our last sowing was the first day of Autumn, when we passed 12 hours of daylight. We sowed enough to carry us through the whole of winter.

Growing them in the glass house, they were ready for transplanting in 21 days, much quicker than late winter sowings. We spaced them closely, 4 heads per 75cm bed width, 15cm in-between rows. By the time our days reduced to less then 10 hours, we had a bed full of mini heads.

We farm in a frost hollow. The heads that survived winter had protection. Those that went through the frost were still edible but visibly damaged.

We cut the mini heads each week and mixed them with other frost hardy greens to form a vibrant winter salad mix. They can also be sold as a mini head. And as soon as our daylight hours started increasing past 10 hours, the remaining heads actively started growing again, gaining mass and carrying us through the late winter. These provided growth much quicker then heads sown in early winter.

These varieties (pictured throughout this post) thrived in winter for us:

• ‘Eruption’ Gem

• 'Winter Density' Gem

• 'Pandero' Gem

• 'Sweetheart' Gem

• ‘Double Density’ Gem

Our trial was conducted over the entire planting season. Gem lettuces thrived in ALL of the following harvest windows:

• Early Spring Sown/Early Summer Harvest

• Late Spring Sown/ Summer Harvest

• Early Summer Sown/ Late Summer Harvest

• Late Summer Sown/Autumn Harvest

• Autumn sown/Winter Harvest (needs protection from frost)

• Winter Sown/Spring Harvest (needs protection from frost)

The lettuces also have a similar growth habit and life size as well - the packets can be mixed and sown as a cut and come again lettuce mix. Cut with scissors at the perfect fork size and add edible calendula petals - Calendula also thrives in winter!

Although gem lettuces thrived in all the planting windows, the transplant to maturity dates are different - IE do not expect a late Autumn sown gem lettuce to be ready for harvest in 35 days.

We have compiled our trial into a download - HEAD LETTUCE PLANTING GUIDE