Getting the spring lettuce planted

This weekend we dodged some rain and dealt with cooler, wet weather to get the kitchen garden, lettuce bed ready and planted.

This bed is right outside our back door and provides wonderful salads until about mid-late June.

I worked the bed with my braodfork to aerate the soil and lossen the compacted winter soil. Then it was raked to a nice soft loam.

I have sworn off tillers because of the damage they do to the microbes and other beneficial parts for the soil, and because of the hard pan it creates.

We planted five varieties of lettuce in this bed. We planted Ideal Cos, New Red Fire, Simpson Elite, Red Salad Bowl, and Buttercrunch.

The Ideal Cos and New Red Fire came as pelleted seeds, that really makes spacing them easy. Lettuce seed is so small that even using a hand planter, like I have pictured, it is difficult to use.

We always try and get the family involved. My daughter loves to plant (hates to weed), and my oldest boy was down in the main garden with the broadfork.

The only other big result of the weekend was getting the front bed weeded, forked, and raked. We are always trying different things in this bed. We've had luck with pumpkins, pickling cukes, and even flowers in the past. This year we considered hot peppers, but have decided to do this bed in cabbage and dill.

Dill acts as a great companion plant. The cabbage worm doesn't like dill much and it keeps them at bay.