Lettuce Seeds - Buttercrunch

Ever popular and easy to grow, Buttercrunch Lettuces are a staple grow-your-own salad leaf, producing crisp, sweet leaves throughout the year. Our Butterhead Lettuce Seeds couldn’t be easier to nurture at home, needing little space, they’ll grow happily outside throughout the warmer months and provide the base for many a salad. 

Butterheads are arguably the favourites in the lettuce world, more expensive to buy at the shops, yet easy to grow. Buttercrunch borrows the best attributes from the butterhead and crisphead lettuce families and boasts crispy sweet yellow hearts that blanch to an appetizing creamy colour. The small open six-inch rosette is fan-shaped rather than round and its dark green, soft and buttery outer leaves make this a standout lettuce for texture and taste.

• Pack size: 250 seeds
• Type: Butterhead
• Time to germination: 10-21 days
• When to sow inside: January - December
• When to sow outside: March - July
• Spacing: 10 - 40cm
• Soil preference: Fertile, well-drained
• Light preference: Full sun, part shade
• When to harvest: January - December

How to grow Buttercrunch Lettuce from seed

Lettuce is an extremely easy plant to grow. Simply pot, apply shade and moisture when the weather is hot and allow full sun and moisture during the colder months. For faster winter growth, utilise your greenhouse.

Sow your Buttercrunch Lettuce seeds shallowly, two seeds to a pot filled with fine compost or coco soil. Any temperature between 4 and 18 degrees is ideal. Lettuce seeds don't germinate well in high temperatures so keep well watered and shaded during summer sowing.

After germination, place on a sunny windowsill, or as we recommend under LED lights to grow on and develop in 3cm thin-wall coco pots before planting out, pot and all. Thinning is optional but recommended for aesthetics.

Plant a good handful of pots every two to three weeks to keep you in harvest across the seasons. Lettuce is also an exceptionally useful (and tasty) plant to intercrop between courgettes and other veg, keeping the soil moist and reducing the weeding volume required. As the courgettes grow, simply harvest your lettuce to allow the space. This also gives the plot a look of abundance often so lacking in the springtime or autumn allotment.

Buttercrunch lettuce is best suited to spring and autumn cultivation but can tolerate heat better than most varieties, avoiding bolting and bitterness.

What to feed your Buttercrunch Lettuce plants

Lettuce plants enjoy nitrogen-rich and free-draining moist soil loaded with plenty of organic matter (which also helps retain moisture). A good mix of rotten farmyard manure and fish, blood and bone meal with some volcanic rock dust and kelp powder gives them a rich, balanced and diverse diet for strong organic growth and over the almost year-long season. This diet will also help the plants to form strong, well-developed immunity. By thoroughly preparing the soil with these long-lasting organic fertilisers, you need not continually fertilise with conventional fertilizers which strip your soil of structure and life.

Keeping pests away

The simple truth is that pests enjoy lettuce as much as we do. We start our lettuce seeds indoors and under lights to ensure a compact healthy seedling which is large enough to survive an encounter with a slug or pigeon. Lettuce seedlings are susceptible to wind, creating a “helicopter” effect, breaking them at the stem. By giving your lettuce the strongest start to life, and proper nutrition, you can minimise the potential damage caused, and get a great crop.

Grow Sow Greener is a regenerative gardening company advocating back to the roots tried and tested methods. We don’t recommend the use of or sell any extremely profitable pesticides, herbicides or inorganic fertilizers. They are detrimental to the health of your entire garden ecosystem from microbe to mammal.

Alternatively, encourage birds, hedgehogs and toads to take up residence, as they are all voracious predators of snails and slugs. Provide a water source, shelter and winter food for birds as well. When ordering Buttercrunch Lettuce seeds from Grow Sow Greener, we reccomend sowing sunflower seeds. Throw a handful into a sunny corner to attract beneficial insects during the summer months, whilst their seed heads provide a great source of food for your overwintering feathered friends.

There are other options to shield from pests completely. Grow indoors under lights, or in wooden seed trays with fresh compost (not from the garden as eggs and slugs reside in soil). Place the legs of the table in bowls or buckets of water.