Anyone growing Celtuce??
I have grown Xingtai 16 from adaptive seeds
And “ Red Celtuce” and “chinese stem lettuce” from true love seeds
I loved them all, (wish i took pictures the variety trialings) what an amazing stir fry or salad vegetable ready early in the season, and they are quite impressive.
I have just moved to a much smaller growing space, (previously having over a half acre to variety trial on) so I have to get clever with my seed saving and space…. Celtuce was top of the list and the red celtuce from true love seeds seemed to have a bit of genetic diversity from my last trials so I decided to get lots of seed from them, I planted out hundreds of red celtuce seedlings as im helping my community learn about starting everything from seed this year and have lots of people to share plants with.. I went through and selected any seedlings that showed any differences from the others and those are who I brought to my garden, one was green leaved instead of red, a little tinge of pink, I am really looking forward to saving seed from the best and most diverse of these and giving them a lot of shaking when they are setting seed, and hope to continue to find some hybrids in future generations, but I atleast have the two distinct phenotypes here to save and share, I am so excited….. now the garden I have before was much more fertile (marsh soils with years of added compost and manure and lots of urine fertilizers and the celtuce were up to a foot tall and quite thick, though some were thinner and some shorter, this season they are all a bit shorter, but currently (as seen in photos) still pushing up each day, the best time to harvest for eating is when the buds have formed but they Arn’t actually flowering, Ill probably harvest the candidates I don’t want to go to seed sometime in the next week- 10 days.
Does anyone have experience with celtuce>?
Im wondering what it got so much taller at the last place but i imagine just more microbial rich soils and more available nutrients because of that!?!
Photos are this years red celtuce.. seeded beginning of april, transplanted April 22nd and first photo of them is may 6th and the rest of the photos are yesterday june 11th 2025(hmm actually going back and looking at photos/dates..perhaps I waited to long to transplant out, (it was such a cold wet soil year for us) im sure direct sown celtuce wouldve gotten taller) but also the fertility and sun is so different in this new space, who knows!
