Valerianella locusta
Large-seeded lamb’s lettuce, corn salad, fetticus, and field salad: this selection stands out for its larger seeds, which are easier to handle and sow evenly—a real advantage when you know how tiny ordinary lamb’s lettuce seeds are. It produces more generous rosettes while retaining the species’ legendary hardiness.
Characteristics:
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Larger seeds: noticeably easier to sow by hand, with less waste.
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Generous rosettes: leaves wider than those of classic varieties.
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Very hardy: tolerates frost without protection and resists diseases well.
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Undemanding: adapts to all soil types and requires very little maintenance.
Sowing advice:
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Exposure: full sun to partial shade.
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Soil: ordinary, moist, and above all firm rather than worked. This is lamb’s lettuce’s great peculiarity: unlike most vegetables, it dislikes freshly dug soil and prefers ground that has remained firm after a previous crop. No amendments are needed.
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Method: sow from July to September for a winter harvest, broadcast or in rows spaced 20 cm apart. Firm the soil after sowing—press it down firmly with the back of a rake or a board: this is the decisive step for good germination. Cover only lightly and keep moist. See how to sow your seeds.
Maintenance advice:
- Water with a fine spray until germination, while late summer temperatures are still warm. After that, there is almost nothing to do.
- No thinning required: lamb’s lettuce is grown densely, as a carpet.
Harvesting advice:
- Cut the entire rosettes at ground level with a knife rather than pulling them up: the soil stays clean and washing is much quicker.
- Harvest as needed: it keeps perfectly well in the ground all winter, even under snow.
Beneficial combinations:
Benefits for biodiversity:
- Its dense carpet covers the soil throughout winter, protecting it from leaching, erosion, and frost—a genuine service to soil life during the harshest season.
- If left to flower in spring, its tiny pale-blue flowers are visited by the year’s very first small pollinators.
Uses:
- Raw in salads, on its own or with beetroot and walnuts. It can also be cooked like spinach or made into a velvety soup. Wash it carefully, as sand can collect in the heart of the rosettes.
Saving your own seeds:
As a biennial, it produces seeds the following spring: leave a few rosettes to flower, then harvest the stems when the seeds turn brown, before they fall. Lamb’s lettuce also readily self-seeds from one year to the next. See how to save your seeds.
Commitment to Quality: at SemiSauvage - Permaculture, we grow and select our seeds with respect for living things as our guiding principle. Based near the Auvergne Volcanoes, we choose open-pollinated, non-hybrid varieties, test them for germination rates, and carefully sort and package them without any chemical treatment. Our belief: to give gardeners back the ability to resow, year after year, seeds that truly belong to them.
Winter lamb’s lettuce, in an easy-to-sow version.
