How do I harvest/cut my lettuces?

Hi thegrindre,

I can share my [limited] experience from my first lettuce garden that I retired last week. First, I echo all of what Shawn said, and she has much more experience than me. I took 3 different approaches to trimming.

1. For the most part, I trimmed from the outside, once leaves matured. I trimmed at the base, or the closet I could feel around for the inner pods. This worked well for me. I would usually harvest from 2-3-4-5 pods to make a salad, use on a sandwich (which I eat like 3-4 times a year), on a veggie burger, or use as a bed for an omelet. To me, the pros of this method is is reduces some of width/bulk of the pod and creates room between them. The cons are it can be difficult and more time consuming to do so. And my lettuces were all often overlapping, meaning trying to disentangle this mature leaf from this immature one...was often not always easy. This is the method that made the most sense to me, so I kind of started here.

2. As the pods matured and developed and produced, I started using the 'hair cut' method wherein you trim off the top 1/3 or top 2". As an aside, the term / word is hard for me to use as it gives me that nails on a chalk board/battery on the tongue feeling. It is also sometimes referred to as the 'cut and come' method. Not much better. The pros of this approach is that you can slowly harvest from many pods. You'd be amazed at how just trimming a little off of several pods, how much you get. The other pro of this is if you have pods of various heights, you can 'even' things out and get them all at the same size (so you do not have to raise the light hood). So, whenever one of my pods was getting taller than the rest, sometimes I'd trim them down to similar heights. The con of this approach is it can produce brown edges. If you want/need full leaves, you may be left with not having that. I would employ this also if I knew I was making a salad, as it was going to be chopped anyhow. 

3. Another approach I used inadvertently was cutting down to the base/down to 1/3 (I think this is the same as what Shawn was referring to). When I THOUGHT my garden was exhausting itself ~65 or 70 and I wanted to start a pepper garden, I started just chopping an entire pod down. To my surprise, it totally grew back beautiful and lush. If you keep doing this, the base of the plan can get kind of brown and slimy (sounds worse than it is), I think from a build up of brown edges, although it is likely also due to my continue harvest outer leaves from the base. But you can cut down an entire pod and it will grow back. As Shawn mentioned, and others have told me, you can usually get three 'full' harvest this way. I cannot attest to that number, but I can say that it will grow back. 

I had the same question/curiosity when I first started in January (and the type A part of my brain still wonders) what is the best/right way. But I think you can really harvest however and whenever you want. Many people it seems to wait much longer than I did (I started harvesting at like day 18 on some of them) and I can see some advantage to that. I just harvested when a) it looked mature and big and b) when I needed lettuce (more so the latter). I would recommend experimenting and trying what works for your purposes. The other 'factor' is timing. If you planted all pods at once (which I think you did), you may want to consider what kind of rotation you want. For example (and I have not done this), but feasibly, you could harvest from one and let another get more mature. Over time this might not make all of yours end at the same time (this can be a pro and a con). But if you wanted to cut down the whole pod, knowing you have others and then won't touch that one for a while, you might have a rotation of fully matured lettuces every few weeks. Just a thought. Feel free to look at my lettuce garden in my garden patch to see some of what I did. 

I love lettuces and greens (to eat) and I love the instant gratification of growing them on top of it feeling self sufficient. I am a vegetarian so I eat a lot of greens, so for me, having the garden saved me a lot over the course of the January - May. And the quality was so much better than the already browning heads I would find in the stores during Winter. 

Good luck!