Messing around with lettuce

[oxbowfarm]

My favorite green leaf lettuce for spring and fall is Black Seeded Simpson, great flavor, great size, and very fast growing. Bolts like lightning so it is no good for summer production but it's our flavor and texture standard for leaf lettuce. Last year we had one red leaved plant show up in a tray of BSS. I let it grow and transplanted it in with the rest of the tray. I wasn't sure if it was a cross or a stray seed from another packet, we are not OCD about how or lettuce seeds get stored.

The red plant was similar in size to BSS but the leaves were somewhat different shape, less ruffles at the edge. It was a medium red color, very similar to New Red Fire in color, but it was not NRF in plant/leaf form. Unfortunately I never thought to take a picture of it. I let it run to seed and collected the seed separately. I began to suspect it was a BSS cross at that point because the seed was black, most of the modern red types we use are white seeded.

This spring I've got a half tray of the seed going with BSS in the other half of the tray. It was definitely a cross as you can see the red color segregating, very cool to see. Some of them are much redder at the seedling stage than New Red Fire, so I'm wondering what the pollen parent was. In the picture below you can see some NRF plants in the tray just showing on the bottom of the picture. I also note that most of the green seedlings are a darker green than BSS which is a very light green lettuce.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this one after these get planted out, but F2s are so much fun to watch.

[12540dumont]

How about this? Spontaneous Lettuce combustion! Red flame lettuce coming up willy nilly. Wait, I dint plant any red romaine last year.

I had green romaine and some sort of something red from wild garden seed....outredgous?

And this year....poof.

I delivered these to the CSA. I had to. They couldn't stay in the path without someone trampling them. I also ate one. Burp. It was yummy. But all lettuce is yummy here in Spring.

The only lettuce I have found to not get nasty bitter is something called "Sweetie" it's hard to find.

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[steev]

BSS is of course a staple, but unless I find marked-down packets of whatever lettuce seed, I just let those that grow past "bittering heat" go to seed. Then I save the seedheads and plant the lettuce patch with what I have. I admit to considering lettuce as a staple only barely, tending to consider any uncooked vegetable (aside from tomatoes) highly suspect.

[galina]

I had fun last year too. So many different types. Have just planted up seeds from one of the 'new' F2 types and will see how uniform they are in this F3 generation. Hope to get a decent new lettuce out of it - if not, it has all been great fun!


Steev, you don't know what you are missing .....................

However, I do recognise that lettuce here in England grows differently to lettuce in hotter climates. Our lettuce does not go bitter unless it is an exceptionally hot summer. Last year some varieties flowered almost too late for seeds. Very much an all the year round crop with the exception of winter, when tiny lettuce plants often survive under cover, but do not grow (all bigger ones rot and perish). Now, second half of April (and later than most years), they are at last putting on new growth in the greenhouse. We are harvesting salad stuff almost every day now and small lettuce leaves are increasingly a constituent of these.

Oxbowfarm, your seedlings look super - enjoy the diversity!

[raymondo]

I bought some BSS seed but was rather taken aback when I opened the packet to find brown, not black seeds. I convinced myself that I had been sold the wrong thing but others have since assured me that, despite the name, the seeds are indeed brown. I'll sow some to see how they fare through our winter.
Like the trays oxbow. What mix do you grow your seedlings in?

[oxbowfarm]

Yes, they aren't really black. It's more of a coffee color brown. White seeds aren't really white either.

[bunkie]

Holly, is that 'Sweetie' a baby romaine?

Looking good there ox! I'm experimenting with a lot of red lettuces this year.

[12540dumont]

Yes it's a dark romaine.
USDA Pi 612660 from Grin.


I got it from
Seed Dreams Tessa Gowan. I'm wondering if I should re-order just to play lettuce bingo with?

[oxbowfarm]

Some of the F2 offspring are still extremely red. The red parent of the original cross looks like it was one of the newer super-red varieties like Cherokee or Outredgeous.

Texturally they leaves are much less ruffled than BSS at the same stage so I suspect the red parent wasn't a leaf lettuce, possibly a romaine as a lot of the seedlings are showing a fairly prominent mid-rib.

If you look at the second row up from the bottom of the picture at the second plant in from the right side, that is about the color of the plant that was parent of all of these lettuces. It is pretty fascinating to look at this planting, every plant is totally individual.

[bunkie]

Looking good Ox!

I have a question. Do the red lettuces have a stronger color to them when they get more sunshine? I have several boxes on our porch that get only morning sunshine, and I noticed that the red colors are very dull, not a deep shade they should be. Will be putting some in moe sunlight and see if they 'color up'.

[oxbowfarm]

That does happen, but maybe not with the super red varieties. I've definitely seen it with New Red Fire, where if it's been growing under rowcover with lots of cloudy days, and you take the rowcover off and they will be green with just little pink blushes of red. If then you get a sunny day, the lettuce will get much more intensely red very quickly, within a day or two. It is either a response to increased light or UV exposure for sure.

The super red varieties like Merlot/Galactic, Cherokee, Outredgeous etc, don't seem to show this nearly as much. They are just pretty much dark red all the time. The interesting thing about these F2 lettuces to me is they are showing expressions of red the whole gamut from super red to basically zero with a huge range of redness in between. It's clearly an additive trait. I also was noticing a lot of pink blushing on some of the lettuces that appear totally green at this stage, but had lots of blushing right after they were planted out.

Also, I think I'm going to do another tray of this F2 seed and do a second planting transplanted directly outdoors to see the colors in full sun vs in the hoophouse.

[richardw]

May 9, 2013 5:23:52 GMT -5 oxbowfarm said:

If you look at the second row up from the bottom of the picture at the second plant in from the right side, that is about the color of the plant that was parent of all of these lettuces. It is pretty fascinating to look at this planting, every plant is totally individual.

Thats amazing the difference,so what's the plan for these plants ,seed?

[oxbowfarm]

Yes, I think so. I'm going to let them get full sized and try and pick the best, most interesting variations and I'll transplant those into odd corners in the houses with the peppers and tomatoes and let them bolt for seed. Some of the green ones are intersting too, much darker/brighter green than BSS. I'd love a bright green leaf lettuce with BSS texture, most of the dark green leaf lettuces like Waldman's Dark Green (I call it Waldman's Green Cardboard), Green Ice, Tropicana, etc are very inferior to BSS in texture, probably cause they are bred for the California shipping trade.

I'm still just having fun watching what they do, it really depends on what turns up. I've actually got a good amount of this F2 seed so I can keep playing with it.

I was reading Frank Morton talking about having lettuce lines descended from similar but not identical parents to get a little more variability. I've never considered breeding lettuce, I'd read crossing the plants is very fiddly. But this is so much fun I might give it a shot this year. Adriana X Cherokee?

[steev]

Oh, the poor California shipping trade! If that ain't corporate agriculture, I don't know what is.

Really, shouldn't you be putting cotton in your salad?

[oxbowfarm]

Coming along. I'm seeing a couple of green leafy ones I'm going to save, not sure if any of the reds are worth it, even though some of them are really dark.