Would you like to stop buying new lettuce seeds? If you would, keep reading and I will show you how to save lettuce seeds from your garden.
I love to save my own seeds in the garden because I get to grow my favorite varieties over and over without buying more seeds!
Under my cucumber trellis I like growing heads of fresh romaine lettuce, but I thought saving lettuce seeds would be too difficult. I was wrong, saving lettuce seeds is not extremely difficult.
If you ever blew on dandelions as a kid then you can save your own lettuce seeds.
Steps for saving lettuce seeds
Here is each step from growing lettuce to saving your own seeds from the plants.
Growing lettuce to maturity
Most people only recognize lettuce before it goes to seed because this is when lettuce tastes the best. If you want to learn how to grow your lettuce from seed read this post.
Once your lettuce is to the stage where it is ready to harvest leave a few plants in the ground. Keep watering and taking care of these plants as if you were going to eat them though.
Eventually these lettuce plants will start to grow flower stalks from the center of the lettuce head. This bolting will cause the plant to grow very tall.
The flowers resemble dandelion flowers (lettuce and dandelions are related) and are very small. These little yellow flowers are where the seeds will come from.
Pollinating the flowers
Before the lettuce flowers open you may want to cover the plants with netting. Isolating the plants from insects can prevent pollination among varieties and with other wild lettuce plants.
While this is not necessary if you do not isolate your lettuce plants there is the possibility of cross pollination. If they do cross, next year's lettuce may look different than what you are expecting.
You may wonder how the plants get pollinated without insects. Lettuce has perfect flowers that will pollinate themselves if you simply shake the flowers.
So if you isolate your lettuce flowers give them a light shake and they will pollinate themselves.
Waiting for seeds
Once your flowers are pollinated the next step is seeds. The growth to seed cycle of the dandelion plant is similar to that of lettuce.
Once the flower pollinates the flower will fade and the lettuce seeds will develop in the base of the flower. After the seeds are fully developed the flower will open back up and the pappus (white fuzzy things) will develop.
Just like dandelions this pappus will carry the seeds away so you need to harvest them before this happens.
How To Harvest Lettuce Seeds
If is very important to wait until the white fuzzy pappus develop on the lettuce plant because this indicates that the seeds are fully developed.
To harvest the seeds you can pull on the pappus and the seeds should come out of the flower head. At the end of each pappus you should see a black or white lettuce seed.
You can also just pull the flower heads off and dry them whole.
How To Clean and store lettuce seeds
Once you have collected your seeds the next step is drying them. I placed the seeds on a brown paper bag and placed it in front of a low running fan.
The seeds need to be dried in a dry, dark, and cool place. Often the best place to dry seeds is in a basement.
After 2-3 weeks your seeds will be dry enough for storage. The next step is cleaning the seeds.
The seeds will need to be removed from the chaff such as the pappus and the flower head. This task can be tedious.
To accomplish this I like to simply rub the seed heads between my hands lightly. Since the seed heads are very dry this should be very easy.
Once all the seed heads are broken up you can now remove the chaff. You can lightly blow the chaff away, but you may lose some seeds in the process.
I like to pick most of the chaff off the seeds and the rest I just put in the seed packet along with the seeds. The chaff is not going to hurt the seeds it just gets in the way.
So, if you don't want to clean your seeds that is completely fine just make sure everything is very dry and you can store the seeds and chaff together.
If you want to know the best way to store your seeds read this post.
That's It
Saving lettuce seeds is really as simple as waiting for flowers and then just harvesting, drying, and storing the seeds. Once you do it you will realize how easy and fun saving your own seeds can be.
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