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Lamb's Lettuce

A variety of lettuce

How to sow lamb's lettuce: Direct seed outdoors, thin plants to 5cm

Sun requirement for lamb's lettuce: Plant in Full Sun

Lamb's Lettuce, or Mâche, is a small, cool-season, annual plant that is eaten as a salad green. Its oval, dark green glossy leaves grow in tight rosettes and have a nutty flavor and soft texture. They can be eaten alone or added to salad mixes. Lamb's lettuce seeds go dormant and cannot germinate at temperatures above 21°C. It will bolt in warm weather. The plant is frost-tolerant and is a common weed throughout Europe, northern Africa, North America, and western Asia. Once the plant is 5cm tall, it can be harvested by cutting the base of the rosette. Leaves have the best flavor if harvested before flowers appear. Like other wild greens, it is high in nutrients, containing three times as much Vitamin C as lettuce, as well as beta-carotene, B6, iron, and potassium.

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Growstuff is a free, community-run site for people who grow food. Keep track of what you plant and harvest, find seeds to swap, and see what is growing near you. Join to record your own lamb's lettuces.

Lamb's lettuce facts

Lifespan

Annual living and reproducing in a single year or less

Height × spread

15cm × 15cm

Row Spacing

20cm

What are growing degree days?

A plant grows with warmth, not with days. A growing degree day is one day's worth of useful warmth: how many degrees the day's average temperature is above the lowest temperature the crop grows at. Add them up from planting and you know how far along the crop is, whatever the calendar says.

Say that lowest temperature is 10°C. A day averaging 17°C gives 7 growing degree days. A day averaging 8°C gives none, as it is too cold for the crop to grow. That is why the same lettuce takes about 50 days in a summer and 90 in an autumn: it needs the same total warmth either way.

For lamb's lettuce, the FAO EcoCrop database gives a lowest growing temperature of 5°C and a shortest growing cycle of 35 days at its best temperature, about 403 growing degree days to a first harvest.

Where you've told us where your garden is, we use this and the weather there to predict when your lamb's lettuce will be ready to harvest. We don't use it for how long a plant lives or when it finishes: we go by what members have logged for that.

Growing lamb's lettuces

deterring pests

place tilted jars of yeast+warm water (or beer) as slug traps at planting out every month

Growing lettuce

Sow seeds in trays 3 weeks before planting out
Dig compost into the bed 1 week before planting out
Water regularly at planting out every week
Weed around the seedlings 2 weeks after planting out
Sow another batch for a continuous harvest 4 weeks after planting out every month
Start picking the outer leaves at first harvest
Pull out plants that have bolted 6 weeks after first harvest