Transcription
This tiny sprout right here is wild lettuce, one of the greatest edible and medicinal plants on the planet. They have an array of traditional uses from a remedy for pain or insomnia, all the way to producing incredible wild salad greens, the best wild salad greens, if you ask me. Today, I'm going to show you how to grow them, which anybody can do. This is an incredibly easy plant to grow. And what I'm going to show you works for all species of wild lettuce.
First, we need to find some wild lettuce seeds and stay tuned because I'm giving a bunch of them away. We really need to get the timing right in order to find wild lettuce at their seed stage because they are wind dispersed. So if you wait too long, they'll already have been all swept up and gone. Generally speaking, I found that a week or so after they begin to flower is usually a good time. In my area of North Alabama, this tends to be around the first half of July, but you can get more detailed timing for wild lettuce and other wild herbs on my interactive foragers calendar.
If you want to just gather the seeds by hand, simply pluck the clusters of the seeds and then pinch off those little wind sails. A quick nerd out here, they're called the pappus. And here is a really cool closeup of them. OK, so you can do this by hand and it works great if you're gathering several dozen seeds. But what if, like me, you want to gather thousands, thousands of seeds? You'll find out why I'm getting so many of them in a second. Well, here's what you do. Find a flowering head that has several seed clusters that are already fully formed and snip the whole thing off from the rest of the plant. Do this for as many as you would like to gather and use. If you aren't yet confident in distinguishing wild lettuce species from another or even from other wild plants, don't worry, we'll be covering that too.
Take the tops home and leave them out in a dry area away from wind. Within two days and usually overnight, many of these seeds will fully develop and you'll witness an explosion of the poofy Pappas. You might be concerned this will result in seeds that aren't fully viable to grow, but I've done germination testing on this and they did just fine. By the way, I typically get like 90 to 100% germination with wild lettuce seeds. So be prepared for that. Now, depending on how many you have, you can just pluck them off again one by one as we did before. But for me, this isn't feasible for how many that I gather. So what I did is I take a big container and I place all the seed heads in and then I shake them around so the loose seeds will fall off. You don't have to go too crazy with this as some of the underdeveloped seeds, which are more of a beige to brown color, they may fall off with them too and you don't want that, but they do adhere more strongly to the plant. They're more enclosed. So if you don't go out of your way to try to get them out, they should remain inside the flower heads.
Okay, so now we're onto the seed cleaning phase, but if you're already thinking that this looks like way too much work, you may be in luck because right now I am running a wild seed drop for my Patreon community members and I still have a bunch of seeds left. So if you would like to receive wild crafted seeds directly from me, scan the QR code or check the description for more details. We're also going to be growing them together, which I'm really looking forward to. All right, once we've shaken those flowering tops, I will remove the large plant parts from the bucket. Now what we'll have is seed, smaller plant material and the fuzzy papaces. What I do at this stage is I just kind of run my hands together with everything. You'll find that the fuzzies stuff will all start to stick together and eventually you should be able to remove all of them without really losing many seeds. Any of the extra bits that I wasn't able to fully clean, I'll just take those and scatter them around my yard in hopes that they might be able to successfully grow themselves.
But this does bring up the question, why are we going through all this trouble if this is a wild plant and it's going to grow in the wild on its own anyway? Yes, this is true. However, in the wild, the germination and success rate of these plants growing is actually really, really small. Although wild lettuce can produce hundreds, maybe even thousands of seeds, only a very tiny portion of those are going to successfully grow. So by us intentionally growing them, we can drastically increase the success rate. If you do want to take a more laid back approach though, I would recommend creating some cracks and crevices in your soil and adding the seeds to those and waiting until the hotter dryer months have passed. I'll elaborate more on that in a second. Let's do a few more steps with the cleaning though. So now they're pretty much good to go from here on out. You can get them as clean as you would like to for your purposes. Since I'm giving these away, I want to try to make them as clean as possible and I achieved that with my handy foraging filters. These things fit perfectly on a five gallon bucket and they are incredible for seed cleaning. If you haven't gotten these yet, I can tell you, they're like they're in my top 10 most important tools for foragers of all time. I'll leave a link for them so you can check them out. For this, we want to remove the extra large stuff and then the extra fine dusty stuff. It doesn't really matter what order that you do this in. I found that the 1 20th inch filter was the best for catching the seeds of wild lettuce. So first I use the 1 12th filter to catch things that are larger than the seeds and then the 1 20th filter to let all the smaller stuff through, but keep our seeds. Here is the final product. It's not perfect, but a major improvement from where we started. It's easy enough to get the seeds out for when we need to use them. And that's really the important thing.
Really quick. This is the first video that I've made on how to grow a wild plant, but I'm not sure if you guys are into this topic. So let me know if you are. And if so, what wild plant you would like to see next. I chatted with Christian from wildlettuce.com for some guidance on this part, as he grows and processes all the wild lettuce that he uses for his products, which are the only ones that I recommend to people. He instructed to me to start wild lettuce in containers and then transplant them into the soul after. So that's what we're going to do. I'm using a seed starting mix that I've moistened until it's about the consistency of wet sand. And then I add our seeds in directly. I've also germinated them first on a wet paper towel because I wanted to test the germination rate. And then I've added them in after they've sprouted both work just fine. In my testing, they start to sprout about one week after you've added them in, by the way, they don't require any cold stratification, any scarification, any of that stuff. It's another reason why they are so easy to grow.
Once they have all sprouted, they are going to start growing quickly, very quickly. Keep an eye on them to ensure that they aren't getting too crowded. What you see here in this cheap container that I used is probably a little bit on the crowded side. Also make sure that those roots don't start to bunch up. Look at this right here. I definitely left them in the container too long. So keep an eye on them because they can start to run away from you. You can transplant them into a larger container or outside into the soil. If it's the right time, they like to grow quickly. And again, make sure to monitor them to prevent the plants from getting root bound in terms of finally transplanting them into the soil. What is the right time? Although you can find wild lettuce seeds during the very hot periods of summer, this is not the best time to plant them. I talked to Christian about this as well, and he recommends waiting for the hot dry summer days to pass before you plant them in the soil. In my area of North Alabama, that's usually around the second half of August. I would give them about a three to five week lead time for them to be ready to transplant. If you were starting them indoors, including the germination time, the plant really just needs enough time to store up some energy and a tap root to make it dormant through the following winter. Wild lettuce are quite hardy. So just make sure to keep them watered after you transplant them, but they don't really need much else. They don't need extra nutrients or anything like that.
Planning for what's going to happen after the grow is an important part of this. In the first season, they're going to grow as a base of rosette and depending on how much energy they're able to store them, they will either continue to grow like this in the next season, or they'll go ahead and bolt and send up a flowering stock. Here's the part that you need to prepare for. I would plant them at least a foot apart, maybe a foot and a half or two feet. A lot of species of wild lettuce usually grow above five feet tall. This method works for every species of wild lettuce that I know. And if you would like to learn how to distinguish different species of wild lettuce, so you can grow exactly the one that you're interested in, then I think you should check out this video right here, where I'll show you how to tell them apart and which one is my favorite. And after that, how to tell them from other plants as well. It's exactly what you're looking for. And I hope to see you there.