Lettuce
Lettuce
Food Plant
A fast-growing salad plant grown for its crisp leaves — a cousin of the dandelion whose parachute seeds drift away on the wind.
💡 Fun Facts
- We grow lettuce for its soft, crisp leaves, which we eat raw in salads.
- In hot weather it 'bolts' — it shoots up a tall stalk and turns bitter.
- It belongs to the daisy family, and its seeds float away on tiny parachutes just like a dandelion's.
📅 Through the Year
- Flowering:July to September
- Fruiting:August to September
Name Story
Lactuca sativa
means “the cultivated milky one”
What does its name mean?
- Lactuca — the milky plantLatin lac ‘milk’
- sativa — sown, cultivatedLatin serere ‘to sow’Decode this word →
Snap a lettuce stem, especially from an older plant, and a milky white sap oozes out — that is exactly what the first word, ‘the milky one’, records. The second word means ‘cultivated’, marking the salad lettuce we grow to eat.