It’s a leafy and tall plant, with small yellow buds, and could be grown right out your door. Plant lettuce with eggplants, broccoli that grows taller to provide shade during the hotter days. It stays crisp and doesn't bolt (flower) and turn bitter as easily as other lettuces, so is a favorite with summer gardeners who want to keep themselves in lettuce all season long. Some people have found it helpful to soak their bitter lettuce prior to using. If you don’t want to make your own you can buy the leaf tea on. Plant lettuce with eggplants, broccoli that grows taller to provide shade during the hotter days. This is why you might find that you can grow lettuce in the spring and it tastes sweet but later in the season it struggles. Water regularly and well. For largest plants, space at the maximum distance given on the label. Whatever your goals, climate, or cooking needs, there’s a lettuce out there for you. A native of Africa, the Bitter Lettuce has been introduced to Florida, Texas, Mexico, the West Indies, Central America, South America, Oman and the Old World. Once the plant gets stressed, it goes into survival mode. Probably the name Launea honors French botanist Jean Claude Michel Mordant de Launay, who lived from 1750-1816. This will give the lettuce plants more time to grow before they realize the weather is getting hot. He was a lawyer-turned-naturalist who as librarian at France's Museum of Natural History wrote books on gardening. Lettuce is a great plant to start with. It is related to common lettuce (), and is often called wild lettuce, bitter lettuce, laitue vireuse, opium lettuce, poisonous lettuce, tall lettuce, great lettuce or rakutu-karyumu-so. Edible or not, it is often listed as an invasive weed. It’s also a smart option if you want to teach kids about gardening. Preventing Bitter Lettuce. A very common plant that will grow almost anywhere where it get lots of sun and little competition from other plants. Succession planting will also help extend the season. Mulch your lettuce to keep the roots cool and fool the plant into thinking its still spring. Chinese lettuce types generally have long, sword-shaped, non-head-forming leaves, with a bitter and robust flavor unlike Western types, appropriate for use in stir-fried dishes and stews. Have you been looking into trying hydroponics? It seeds in an effort to It’s during this process that bitter lettuce is produced. Its flower head, consisting only of ray flowers, like a dandelion, was a typical prickly lettuce flower head, and a pleasure to contemplate against the Yucatan's deep blue sky, as shown below: The ray flowers with their wishbone-shaped style arms spectacularly burst outward from their involucre, as seen in a top view, below: Some of the plants heads already had matured, producing cypsela-type fruits topped with "white parachutes," their "pappi," designed for wind dispersal, as shown below: The plant's Dandelion-like leaves cluster toward the base, but a few leaves do arise very low on the stems -- not all rising from the ground as with Dandelions -- as seen below: When the plant was keyed out in the online Flora of North America, the key surprised me by not leading directly to the prickly-lettuce genus Lactuca. Only one species of Launea is described in the Flora of North America, LAUNAEA INTYBACEA, and that species also is listed for the Yucatan. When temperatures rise, the plant snaps into maturation mode and bolts, that is, sends out a stalk and flowers. A cool weather crop, butter lettuce should be planted in the spring, or in late fall in warmer climates. Anyway, Bitter Lettuce is a perennial that keeps producing new rosettes of leaves at the plant's bottom year after year, sending up new shoots from the root for several years, probably at the beginning of each new rainy season. Bitter Lettuce is also eaten by farm animals. Lettuce (Lactuca sativa) is an annual plant of the daisy family, Asteraceae.It is most often grown as a leaf vegetable, but sometimes for its stem and seeds. 'S board `` bitter lettuce is a plant bitter lettuce plant the spring, starting two weeks before frost one our! Listed as an invasive weed this is a bitter substance that has been since... Easily, lettuce is the summer heat flowers it produces a bitter milky sap that the... Fool the plant will bolt much faster from too much sunlight to,. 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