Salad Days : The head and leaf varieties that make their way to the market are just the tip of the iceberg for Southland lettuce gardeners.

Let us discuss lettuce, although some might call this a non-story because they find lettuce so effortless to grow.

With the possible exception of the rabbit-quick radishes, there really is nothing faster or easier than lettuce, and you can start it year around, in a container or in the ground.

“It’s easy, a happy plant in the garden,” said Janie Malloy, who runs Home Grown, Edible Landscaping, in Pasadena, and has planted many a lettuce patch for others.

Joan Naniche, who has been growing lettuce in her Mar Vista community garden plot for the last 10 years, agrees, and in this mild coastal garden she has never been without. “My husband and I eat a lot of salads,” she said. “Practically every day.”

The only trick to growing lettuce is preventing “bolting” during hot weather--the premature production of seed stalks. But there are new varieties that resist bolting (though nearly every catalogue description claims that their varieties “resist heat”).

Lettuce is a cool-season crop, preferring to grow during the cooler months of the year. It grows right through our excuse for a winter, growing fastest in fall and spring.

When the weather gets too hot in summer, it might bolt if left in the ground too long or when grown in hot inland areas, diverting all its energy into seed stalk production. At that point, old leaves shrivel and new leaves become bitter.

Because of our long, cool growing season, California became famous for its lettuce early on, especially after Los Angeles seedsman H. L. Musser introduced a head type from France, around 1902, that later became known as “iceberg” lettuce, though it was first called Los Angeles Market. (The true Iceberg, introduced in 1894, is still sold by Burpee seed.)

Because it grew as a compact, cabbage-like ball, it was easy to ship east in refrigerated railroad cars, and, since we could grow it in almost any season, it soon dominated Eastern as well as Western markets.

For a while, iceberg-type lettuces were just about the only lettuce you could buy, though in the last few years, other lettuces have begun to compete with it at stores (it still commands 80% of the market), and eclipse it in the garden. Lettuce hybridizer William Waycott, formerly with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and now Petoseed, said you can broadly divide lettuces into six categories--the leaf lettuces, romaine lettuces, the butterheads, the crispheads, Latin lettuces and the stem lettuces.

Stem lettuce (also called celtuce) is an Asian kind where the leaf is discarded and the stem eaten (“Lettuce leaves are for geese,” said a Chinese friend of Waycott’s). Latin lettuces (one variety is named Gallega) are for Mediterranean and South American climates that are warmer even than ours in winter. Both may be difficult to find seed for.

Not so the other four. Countless varieties exist and according to a few gardeners, the fun is trying as many as you can.

Some gardeners delight in mixing red-tinged lettuces with yellow-green, making red-green patterns in the vegetable garden.

By far the most popular in home gardens are the leaf lettuces because they are the easiest to grow, though they are also the most prone to bolt.

One of the oldest varieties is Black-Seeded Simpson, introduced in 1879. It’s still the most common in seed racks. Joan Naniche ranks this heirloom lettuce with the crinkled leaves one of her favorites.

Salad Bowl (an All-America Selection), Red Salad Bowl, Prizehead and Red Sails are common loose-leaf types. Oakleaf is a lettuce with the deeply lobed leaves and it is one of the most heat resistant, a good choice for late summer harvesting.

Naniche likes all of these, but especially the red varieties--Red Sails, Red Oakleaf and Red Salad Bowl. “I went crazy over red lettuces,” she said.

Leaf lettuces are also called “cutting lettuces” because you don’t wait for them to mature, but cut the leaves as you need them. For this reason alone, you should always have some coming along. Most are full grown in less than 50 days and will then produce seed stalks, so you should plant a little (say a two-foot row) every few weeks throughout the year.

Janie Malloy broadcasts the seed on compost-enriched beds, waters them by hand with a gentle spray until they germinate, then begins eating the thinnings two weeks later so the plants end up 4 to 6 inches apart. She keeps cutting leaves until the plants begin to bolt. This way, she has lettuce for a good two months from each sowing.

Lettuce can be as easily grown in a large container as it is in the ground. If there is any secret, it is watering frequently, but not fertilizing much, if at all (to avoid nitrate buildup in the leaves).

Invest any time and money in preparing the soil, which should be loose and fluffy with organic amendments. Those lucky few who garden on a sandy or silty soil will find growing lettuce ridiculously easy. Those that don’t can get similar results by growing in mounded or raised beds, as Malloy does.

She plants in all seasons, although she said that the seed germinates poorly in August and September. The way around this is to save those little six-packs flowers come in, refill with potting soil and sow seed in them so they can be kept in partial shade while they sprout, then transplant several weeks later into the garden.

There’s little point in buying nursery packs already planted to lettuce. The seed germinates very surely in a few days and barely needs to be covered with soil.

Some gardeners in hot, inland areas, always grow their lettuce in partial, midday shade in late summer. One client of Malloy’s has a thriving summer bed in Glendale that only gets six hours of sun each day. You can achieve this in the partial shade of a tree or make a small shade structure to grow the lettuce under, which is what some gardeners do where it gets really hot (over 100 degrees). But, at this time of the year, you needn’t bother. Days will be cool by the time the lettuce is maturing.

Although leaf lettuces are easy to grow, Waycott said there are much tastier lettuces, starting with the Butterheads and Bibbs (or Limestones, as they’re sometimes called back East). These form loose heads, very loose and creamy-colored in the case of the Bibb types.

Bibb and Buttercrunch are the standard Butterhead varieties, but a favorite of Malloy’s customers, and many other gardeners (including me), is the French Bibb-type named Merveille des Quatre-Saisons or just Four Seasons lettuce. It’s tasty and very pretty, a maroon-blushed lettuce that can be harvested like a loose-leaf or left to sit and form a small buttery soft head that melts in your mouth.

Romaine is the lettuce of ancients. Sometimes called Cos, which is an island off the coast of Turkey, it was grown by the Egyptians, Waycott said. It is, of course, the lettuce with the stiff, crunchy leaves, longer than they are wide, that are used to make Caesar salads.

There is also a bronze version, not as crinkled or crunchy, named Rouge D’Hiver or Red Winter.

Romaines are usually harvested when mature, which takes about 75 days, when they make a loose, tall head.

True tolerance to bolting is found in the crisphead types of lettuce. Burpee’s Iceberg and Great Lakes are traditional strains of this crunchy, head-forming lettuce.

The crisphead lettuces we gardeners can get seed for tend to be those with the most tolerance of extremes. Three that should do well in Southern California and that can be grown at almost any time, are Summertime, Mission and a new in ’95 miniature called Mini-Green, that makes baseball-sized heads. All resist bolting but take time to mature (75 or more days).

Waycott says that the last three weeks are the crucial time for crispheads. Most of the head is formed then and daytime temperatures should be around 70-75 degrees at that time, though Summertime, Mission and Mini-Green can stand more heat (85-90 degrees in the case of Mini-Green).

Near the coast, this means you can grow crispheads year round; inland where summers are really hot and winters colder, the traditional planting months are late July through September, and then again in late February and March. Seedlings can stand the heat and 60-90 days later, when heads form, the temperature should be right.

If you haven’t grown lettuce in a while, or at all, this is the season to start because plants will grow rapidly in the warm (even hot) fall weather and mature slowly during cooler days. Just be sure to plant a little at a time, and then keep doing so throughout the year--so you don’t get too much in one week or run out later in the year, just as the tomatoes ripen. In Southern California, you need never be without.

Seed Sources

You can order the varieties mentioned, and many more, from the following sources:

W. Atlee Burpee & Co., Warminster, Pa. 18974.

The Cook’s Garden, P.O. Box 535, Londonderry, Vt. 05148.

Nichols Garden Nursery, 1190 N. Pacific Highway, Albany, Ore. 97321-4598.

Park Seed Co., Cokesbury Road, Greenwood, S.C. 29647-0001.

Seeds of Change, 1364 Rufina Circle 5, Santa Fe, N.M. 87501.

Shepherd’s Garden Seeds, 30 Irene St., Torrington, Conn. 06790.