Alright this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
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Alright this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
Today we have another exciting episode for you.
Today is another Growing Your Greens in a Minute.
This one's probably going to be one of my shorter videos.
But anyways, in this video what we're going to talk about today is lettuce.
I've been harvesting like basically two heads a day lately to try get them in me before
they bolt like this one in the back that I cut back.
Actually, that's not even lettuce, it's related to lettuce.
But anyways, the whole purpose of this video is to share with you guys three reasons why
you should never grow iceberg lettuce plus the one reason why you should.
As well as I'm going to go ahead and share my tips with you guys about growing lettuce
and the varieties that I encourage you guys to grow.
So let's get right into this!
Reason number one why you shouldn't grow iceberg lettuce is because nutritional value is lower
than the other kinds of lettuces because the iceberg lettuce is closed up in a ball, most
of the leaves don't get the direct sunlight so they don't green up.
Aside from the leaves and not greening up and creating more chlorophyll and other phytochemicals
and phytonutrients, a lot of the lettuces I have some are like red and like different
green/reddish color.
They got like purple lettuce and all this kind of stuff.
These lettuces even have higher levels of phytonutrients and phytochemicals due to the
dark rich pigment in there.
So I'm going to encourage you guys to grow some really dark lettuces.
They taste the same, they may even have a little bit strong lettuce flavor unlike the
iceberg that kind of tastes like you're just eating water.
The other thing you want to go is you want to grow open head lettuces, ones that go real
far and wide, like as much as I love the romaine, it's more of a closed head compared to some
of my loose leaf lettuces that really open up to the sun and look beautiful and really
all the leaves get some good amount of sun so that they could be more, create more nutrition
in there.
So the second reason why you shouldn't grow the iceberg lettuce is because it's one of
the lettuces you can't just come and pick the outside leaves on and eat leaves for weeks
until it starts to bolt like this guy here.
Then I'll just harvest the whole thing here and it them for dinner, potentially even tonight.
The iceberg, while you could harvest some outer leaves, it's not really conducive to
do that because you'll kind of wreck the structure of it and it kind of messes it up and all
this kind of stuff.
It's more of a pain in the butt to harvest.
So I don't really like that.
I seem to get less yield on the icebergs.
They don't quite grow as quickly, probably one of the reasons is because they're not
getting as much sun.
Some of these nice large loose leaf lettuce, I mean look at that, the size of that lettuce,
it's like bigger than my hand, it's huge.
Now our third and final reason why you should not grow iceberg is because it's a hybrid
plant and it may be more susceptible to diseases.
As you guys will see my iceberg, a lot of them actually succumbed to this kind of funky
like rot stuff.
Now this seemed to happen after we got like some heavy downpours of rain and maybe some
water got in there and it just kind of rotted out and got nasty.
So a lot of them I actually just had to cut and chuck or put in my compost pile.
Some of them I cut off the bad spots and eat the good stuff.
A few of them are left but they're kind of just, kind of messed up, right.
They did not perform as well as some of my other ones that really have nice heads of
lettuce and grew a lot better.
So you know I always encourage you guys to experiment in your garden, I experimented
this time this seasons with many different lettuces and you'll learn that some work better
than others and iceberg was definitely not a winner for me.
Now of course along with the reasons why we should not grow the iceberg, there's definitely
a reason why you should grow it, which we'll get into in a second.
but I wanted to talk to guys about before I do is that people always try to think in
terms of right/wrong, good/bad and all this kind of stuff.
That's kind of like more convergent thinking where you just, you got to have the answer,
this is the right way to garden, the way I do it microbes and minerals and all this kind
of stuff, organic compost and I like this method as a better method, it is the method
I choose to use.
You guys of course could do any method you want.
Yeah, you could grow stuff with chemical fertilizers and miracle crap fertilizers and stuff and
I'm not one to tell you not to do that if that's what you choose to do.
I do it like this, right.
Nothing's ever right/wrong, good/bad.
I'm never going to say like grow with miracle crap fertilizers.
You just shouldn’t even grow it.
I always think it's better to grow your own food and it's not like so absolute, like it
doesn't have to be always right or always wrong or should we never ever grow iceberg
lettuce or are there times where you might want to do some, grow it for some reasons.
With everything in life, even with you're wife there's pros and cons about her or your
husband.
There's pros and cons about it, things that you like and things you don't like so much.
But we focus on the things we like more.
So I just want you guys to remember this, as much as I don't particularly care for the
paleo diet so much, there's good things about it.
Hey, man you know somebody on a paleo diet they're going to eat lots of vegetables.
That's something you're supposed to eat on a paleo diet, doesn't mean you're going to
eat a lot of them, something maybe not so good about the paleo diet is that if you think
about it and look back what paleo people were eating, they weren't really eating the paleo
diet, what we call the paleo diet, of today.
Back in the paleothic times they ate insane amounts of fiber and most paleo dieters or
people eating the paleo diet don't eat that volume of fiber.
If they did I probably would have less problems with it.
But that's, so it's not like always clear cut.
Yeah, of course a paleo diet is way better than eating standard American diet but you
could even do better than that, right.
So it's not like this is right, this is wrong, this is good, there's like, I teach good,
better, best for you guys, right.
Just do the best you can whether that's in your gardening life, whether that's in your
professional life, your personal life, whatever it is.
Well enough of my rant.
This video's getting too long as it.
Okay, so one reason why you should grow iceberg lettuce and there'll be people that this reason
may be applicable to and others that won't, is if you need a good storage lettuce.
Iceberg lettuce was basically hybridized and grow so that it could be grown, cut, put in
a fridge, put in a refrigeration truck, put in a warehouse, cold warehouse and it's going
to stay good for months, actually as a matter of fact I have a store bought iceberg lettuce
that I bought actually when my lettuce was not yet growing.
It's been in my fridge, it's still good.
I mean there's some bad outer leaves but the inside'll be fine because it's a good storage
lettuce.
In certain situations this may be a good thing.
Romaine stores pretty long but not quite as long as iceberg.
So maybe when you're getting to the end of the season, in the fall, and you want to have
some fruits and vegetables out of your garden to eat in the winter, well of course things
like winter squashes are really good, they store all winter.
But iceberg you could probably get by with storing it like maybe two months, harvest
it, keep it dry and then also use a device that you put in your fridge that's actually
going to minimize rot and contamination or mold growth and bacteria growth.
I'll have an episode of this one of these days pretty soon.
Then it's going to store longer.
Then you could be eating stuff out of your garden in the middle of winter like the iceberg.
Of course you could also put a hoop house over your beds if you wanted to grow it.
I encourage you guys to grow year round, wherever you live.
It's always best to harvest and then eat the stuff you're growing.
Don't just harvest it and then put it in your fridge and then eat it.
That's still than buying it from the store if you're going to do that.
But I want you guys when you're ready to eat food, come out here and harvest.
Every day I've been coming out lately and I'll harvest like a head of lettuce, some
Swiss chard and some celery and then I'll just that up with a pineapple and then for
dinner, I'll come out and maybe have another head of lettuce or a bunch of leaves of lettuce
and make a soup.
That's how simply I eat.
I want all guys to do this.
It's very important for me that you guys are eating out of your garden, predominately eating
as much of the food that you eat of your garden because I know a lot of you guys are still
eating a big percentage of processed foods and packaged and bottled and canned foods,
right.
I want you guys really to concentrate on your garden.
If you have a lot of kale leaves man, make a juice with it, that condenses the, that
takes a lot of kale, puts it in a small place, I fill up on juice in the morning.
Instead of eating breakfast get yourself a juicer and start drinking your greens.
That's, they're one of the best things on the entire planet.
I guess if you are looking for a juicer I do encourage you guys to check me out, discountjuicers.com
and check my other YouTube channel out, youtube.com/rawfoods where I have a juicer comparisons.
Thank you guys for your support, that have supported me in the past and thank you guys
for your support for those of you guys that are going to purchased from me in the future.
This allows me to make my gardening videos because that is my real job and that pays
the bills.
Anyways, this video's getting too long, but once again, want to encourage you guys to
always grow your food and eat as much as you guys can out of your garden and there's pros
and cons to everything in life.
In this case growing iceberg lettuce, in my opinion there's definitely more cons than
there are pros.
So if you guys enjoyed this format hey please give me a thumbs up to let me know, also be
sure to click that subscribe button right down below to be notified of my new and upcoming
episodes I've coming out about every three to four days.
Also be sure to check my past episodes, I have over 1100 episodes now on my YouTube
channel, teach you guys all aspects of gardening.
So once again my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
We'll see you next time and until then, remember keep on growing.
Latest episode on Growing Your Greens!
Alright this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
Today we have another exciting episode for you coming at you from my girlfriend's parent's
backyard square foot raised bed garden and I just got them a--