Batavia Lettuce Carmen - Lactuca sativa

The 'Carmen' Batavia Lettuce is a beautiful dark green salad with a hint of red, its shiny, thick, and slightly crinkled leaves forming a large and heavy head. It is resistant to most lettuce diseases and has excellent taste quality. This spring, summer, and autumn lettuce is sown from February to September and harvested from March to October. It is a very hardy variety that resists running to seed.

If Lettuce is one of the most popular vegetables (4.2 kilograms per year per person), it is appreciated for its freshness, crunchiness, as well as its taste and nutritional qualities. It can be consumed raw in salads but also cooked, for example, to accompany peas.

As the ultimate leaf vegetable, Lettuce is an annual plant belonging to the large Asteraceae family. Its Latin name, Lactuca sativa, refers to both the white sap (lactuca) that oozes when cut and the fact that it is cultivated (sativa).

It is an essential vegetable in any respectable vegetable garden, and there are so many varieties that it can be grown almost all year round.

Growing Lettuce is easy as long as you respect the cultivation calendar for each variety. Its growth is fast, and it thrives in any soil, provided it is rich and remains moist.

Harvest: Simply cut it with a knife when it reaches ripeness.

Storage: Lettuce can be stored for a few days in the refrigerator, but to enjoy its freshness to the fullest, we recommend consuming it immediately after harvesting.

Gardener's tip: During hot summer weather, lettuces exposed to direct sunlight tend to wilt. To prevent this, protect them from intense rays by using overturned crates. In our garden, summer lettuces are not grown in rows but interspersed throughout: at the base of climbing beans, in the middle of cucumbers and squash, whose foliage provides beneficial shade.