Organic Lettuce Seeds - Salad Bowl Red

Grow organic red leaf lettuces at home with our GMO-free Salad Bowl Red Lettuce Seeds. Producing gorgeous burgundy leaves that help bulk out salads and sandwiches, these easy growers are a pretty addition to beds and can be successfully harvested for most of the year.

This gorgeous loose-leaf variety has dark red crinkled leaves and is favoured for its shape, growth rate and taste. It looks great alongside the green-leafed variety in the plot or on the plate. The texture is superb and doesn’t get bitter as it matures, making it an ideal salad leaf. Salad Bowl Red has good resistance to heat, tip burn and is slow to bolt, making this is a great cut and come again or whole head variety of lettuce.

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

How to grow Organic Salad Bowl Red Lettuce from seed

Lettuce is an extremely easy plant to grow. 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 Organic Lettuce Salad Bowl Red Seeds shallowly, two seeds to a pot, filled with fine compost or coco soil. Any temperature between 4 and 18 degrees is ideal. Lettuce seed doesn’t germinate well in high temperatures, so keep well watered and shaded during summer sowing.

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

Plant a good handful of pots every two to three weeks. Organic Salad Bowl Red is an extremely popular baby leaf style lettuce, and you can expect your first pickings after around days 30-40. Alternatively, grow on in the plot, interplanted with the green variety, for border worthy aesthetics, or interplant with larger maturing veg to act as a useful and tasty gap filler. Organic Salad Bowl Red is simple to grow and adds interest and beauty to the plot and plate.

Harvest the whole head, or pick the outer leaves as you wish. Harvesting is best done early in the day and, as always, refrigerate dry.

What to feed your 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 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 use 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. Giving your lettuce the strongest start to life and proper nutrition can minimise the potential damage caused, resulting in a successful 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.

Encourage birds, hedgehogs and toads to take up residence instead, as they are all voracious predators of snails and slugs. Provide a water source as well as shelter and winter food for birds. 

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) and place the table's legs in bowls or buckets of water.