clams plants naturally move from a vegetational DoS into a procreative State Department from biological initiation in the surround . Typically lettuce will flower when the temperature warm up in belated spring or early summer . It is a cool - time of year veg and prefer the cool seasons of spring and autumn for foliage production .
Natural Flowering
Lettuce is typically harvest before it flowers as a leafy head . Gardeners and Fannie Merritt Farmer will leave a circumstances of their lettuce crop intentionally letting it blossom and seed . If you ’ve been glean leaf from your dinero plants without taking the head , they will eventually commence flowering . Plants that have produced a embonpoint head or square green throughout the season are in all likelihood flowering naturally and should be leave to go to seed .
Successional planting will ensure that all of your lettuce wo n’t flower at once . With flora at unlike phase of increase , you should always be capable to reap some edible farewell . To do this , plant new seeds every two weeks throughout the twelvemonth .
Bolting
Once lettuce begins to flower , it produces a fool that makes the leaves bitter and unpalatable . Because of this , the challenge with dough is to prevent its biologic clock from decide to flower for as long as potential .
Sometimes , lolly will speedily bloom before it has produced its full potential of comestible folio . It happens due to stress cistron like :
When this happens it ’s calledbolting . The factor listed above cause bolt when the plant gets too much of them . Too much heat , too much sunlight , or being too wry will cause bolt lettuce plants .
Seed Saving
When a loot plant peak , it will transport up a flowering shoot out of the central top where new leave grow . This shoot will grow taller than the balance of the industrial plant and then produce clusters of flower heads . If your industrial plant start out to stretch toward the sky there ’s a near chance it ’s bolt .
lolly flowers do n’t need pollinator to acquire cum , the flowers grow into each other and pollinate themselves . The flowers will wilt and give fashion to pappus , or livid feather - like parachutes . The function of these in nature is to carry the ejaculate on the hint so that it can grow somewhere else .
When you see pappus arise , you know that it ’s just about clock time to write germ . Saving seed not only saves money each year but over clip it will avail acclimatise a variety of boodle to your garden specifically . By selecting the healthy plant to keep open come from each yr you tone the var. and serve it to adapt .
Each pappus parachute will have two or three seeds attached to it . It ’s easy to bare rub the pappus between your fingers and take into account the tiny surfboard shaped seed to fall into your hand . Store them in a dark and wry position , and stigmatize each container with the variety and date harvested .
