How to Grow Lettuce & Salad Greens All Season

GardenDraft Team · May 5, 2026 · 7 min read

Part of: Garden Planning Guides · How to Grow Vegetables — Crop Guides A–Z

Lettuce is the crop that makes you feel like a natural the first time you grow it: it sprouts in days, grows fast, asks for very little, and you can start picking long before it's "done." The only real skill is timing, because lettuce is a cool-weather plant at heart. Work with its love of cool and you can have fresh salad on the table for most of the year.

Cool weather is what lettuce wants

Lettuce and most salad greens grow best in the cool of spring and fall, when temperatures sit in the 60s°F. They germinate poorly in hot soil and turn bitter and bolt when summer arrives. So the prime sowing windows are early spring and again in late summer for a fall crop: the shoulders of the season, not its peak. In hot regions, a spot with afternoon shade stretches the spring crop further. Check the lettuce catalog page for variety differences.

Sow shallow and often

Lettuce seed is tiny and needs light to germinate, so barely cover it — a dusting of soil is enough — and keep the surface damp until it sprouts, which can take just a few days. You can start indoors for transplants or direct-sow; both work. Most salad greens are happy in shallow soil and even containers, making lettuce one of the easiest crops for beginners.

Harvest the smart way: cut and come again

What makes lettuce so productive is that you don't have to wait for a whole head. Pick the outer leaves as you need them and the plant keeps growing from the center, or shear a whole patch of loose-leaf types an inch above the soil and it regrows for another cut or two. Harvest in the cool morning when leaves are crisp, and you'll pull weeks of salad from one sowing.

Keep it coming all season

Two techniques turn lettuce from a brief spring treat into a months-long supply. Sow a short row every two to three weeks rather than all at once — the heart of succession planting — so a fresh batch is always coming on as the last one tires. And learn to read the warning signs: when a plant shoots up a tall central stalk and the leaves turn bitter, it's bolting, triggered by heat and long days, as covered in why vegetables bolt in summer heat. Pull bolting plants and lean on heat-tolerant varieties through the warm weeks. Time your spring and fall sowings to your location with the planting calendar.