Cos Lettuce Novappia plants - Lactuca sativa

The 'Novappia' Lettuce is a beautiful, very early butterhead lettuce that forms large heads of smooth, thin and tender leaves, with a blonde green colour. It's an improvement of the 'Appia' lettuce, with the same cold tolerance and resistance to bolting, but less susceptible to diseases. It's an easy-to-grow salad with excellent taste. Harvest in spring to summer.

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

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

It's 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 follow the cultivation calendar for each variety. Its growth is fast and it thrives in any soil, as long as it's rich and remains moist.

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

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

Gardener's tip: During hot summer days, lettuces exposed to full sun tend to wilt miserably. To avoid this phenomenon, consider protecting them from too intense sunlight with turned-over crates. In our garden, summer lettuces are not grown in rows but are interspersed everywhere: at the base of climbing beans, in the middle of cucumbers and squashes, whose foliage provides beneficial shade.