Did you know you can stick the bottom of your lettuce in water and actually keep growing it after you use it? It works great with Romaine! I got a pack of Artisan Lettuce recently (which is a bit pricey) so I decided to see if I could stretch it a little farther and get some extra lettuce out of it, and it worked!

Replanting and Regrowing

I always replant my green onions, and make sure I leave enough of the bottom part to pop in water to sprout roots. So when I heard you can do it with lettuce, I decided to give it a try. I usually grow my own lettuce in the Lettuce Grow hydro tower, but sometimes I still get different lettuces at the grocery store. (click the bold text if you are interested in learning more about hydro gardening!)

With green onions you can keep regrowing and cutting them over and over, but with lettuce it will usually give you one more smaller crop before it just poops out and doesn’t grow anymore. It’s a bit different than growing it in my hydro tower because there I just let it keep growing and cutting as I use it.

How to Regrow Lettuce

First, save the last bit at the bottom with the steam. Put that in water and in about a week it will sprout roots. That’s it. Pretty easy! I used little cocktail glasses for mine, and sat them on the windowsill to wait for roots. You can see the tiny white roots coming out of the lettuce bottom on the right.

Next you’ll want to plant them in the dirt in a sunny, but not too sunny, location. Then water and wait.

Only one of mine regrew enough to make a salad, but this was my first experiment with it and I think I put it in a too sunny location. The heat gets pretty intense here in Florida! I think it might have worked better if I kept it indoors on the windowsill and grew it there. That will be the next experiment!