Have you ever tasted your homegrown lettuce only to find that you can barely keep chewing it? Last year this happened to me. My lettuce got bitter, and, this year, it happened again.
I was totally surprised when I took my first bite because it hadn’t gotten that hot yet. Luckily, I hadn’t harvested much of the lettuce yet. I had just taken one leaf off on my way out the door to work since that’s all I eat for breakfast. One leaf fills me right up – kidding, of course. I was just sampling.
I thought back to the articles I read last summer. Luckily, we had SIGNIFICANT rainfall this May which was perfect for testing out one of the theories I read last year. An article I found said to harvest your lettuce in the morning and/or after a rainfall and that the rain would fill the leaves back up with water making it less bitter from the hot sun.
We had quite the thunderstorm on the eve of Mother’s Day, so I harvested the lettuce the next morning. You would have never known it was bitter a week or so earlier! It was tender, refreshing and contained no bitterness at all. Voila! Mother Nature saved our homegrown Mother’s Day salad.
SO, if you find yourself with bitter lettuce (because it got hotter faster than you realized), don’t give up. Do a rain dance!