If you’ve ever grown Aerogarden lettuce that is bitter – you may have been disappointed and may now be wondering what happened and what to do in the future.
The good news – there are ways to avoid this issue!
The first thing to look for when troubleshooting bitter lettuce is the cause. There are several causes.
Such as: improper storage, giving it a nutrient boost right before you’re planning to harvest, and having overheated in those hot summer months. If it looks like you have old lettuce it probably has exceeded its useful life and bitterness is sure to rise.
To put it simply, if you have the opportunity to do something about it – then it’s worth considering.
Reason 1 – Improper Storage
Once lettuce has been harvested, it must be stored properly, and the type of food that lettuce is stored with is even more important than you’d think.
Lettuce must stay in the fridge, but do not store it in the same drawer as fruits like pears, bananas, and apples.
These fruits produce ethylene gas, which induces ripening, and this will make your lettuce spoil quickly and taste awful. Freshly harvested lettuce can also be quite bitter.
If this is the case for you, you can take the best lettuce and store it in a very humid container for two days in the fridge at around 32 degrees F. This humidity will moderate the bitterness over the two days.
Key Takeaway: Good storage will help retain the sweetness and preserve freshness longer.
Reason 2 – The Recent Addition of Nutrients
You will be adding nutrients to your lettuce on a regular basis when using an Aerogarden, but do your best to not do it right before harvest time.
A little while after you add nutrients, you will create some bitterness in your lettuce because it has just began to absorb them.
This will happen for a day or two, so do not feed your lettuce just before harvesting if you can.
If it’s too close, harvest it and then feed it after to avoid the bitterness experience.
Reason 3 – Too Much Heat
Lettuce enjoys partial shade.
Being a cool season crop, lettuce prefers temperatures between 60 to 70 degrees F and not warmer or colder.
If it gets warmer, lettuce will stop growing, and it may bolt.
Bolting is when the lettuce gets stemmy preparing to produce seeds. A long shoot will form great quickly, which will turn the lettuce bitter and unpleasant.
If lettuce has bolted, it needs to be composted and started over.
Lettuce should be kept in situations when the sun is hot, in shade.
Lettuce can tolerate some sun, but hot sun ruined and crops.
Partial shade helps keep the leaves sweet and tender.
If you have an Aerogarden on a windowsill
either put up a net curtain to disperse the sunlight, or
move the lettuce elsewhere when it is hot.
You can try putting a blind down, but don’t close it to tight or it will block all the light your lettuce needs to grow.
If the lettuce has been in too much heat, the only solution is to uproot it and attempt to grow fresh seeds as there is nothing you can do at this point to remove bitterness.
If the lettuce is only slightly bitter, you may try picking it early in the morning.
By then it will have had a full night to recover from the hot sun.
You could rinse it off and place in the fridge until ready for lunch.
Things to Avoid: You should try and not grow lettuce when the sun is really hot. It is often going to be heat stressed, or bitter regardless of efforts to keep cool.
Reason 4 – Nutrient Stress
While it’s a bad idea to feed your lettuce too close to harvest, it’s also a bad idea to not feed your lettuce, since a lack of nutrients will result in bitter lettuce.
This is especially true in an Aerogarden, where the lettuce will rely on your nutrient additions instead of sourcing the nutrients from the soil.
If it’s time to feed the lettuce, don’t wait to do so, because delaying feeding the lettuce will lead to decline in quality if it doesn’t get nutrients.
A day or two should be fine, but if your lettuce is bitter, check the last time you fed it, and give it a top up.
Reason 5 – Old Lettuce
Once your lettuce plant is reaching maturity, its leaves will become increasingly bitter.
Young leaves are always going to be the best, sweetest and tenderest. The old leaves are going to be tougher, and less enjoyable.
When your plant gets old, the older leaves will be turning bitter rather quickly. And you may also notice that even the young leaves lose their flavor, too.
When this happens it is time to strip the plant out and start again.
Most individuals pick lettuce by just pulling off a few leaves each time, and this is a perfectly acceptable method of enjoying your plant – but eventually you will have to get the whole lettuce plant out of the ground.
Use what leaves you can and compost then the rest. You can also plant a new lettuce plant in the same spot by planting fresh seeds.
Some people use the old lettuce leaves up by using some sort of cooking method to remove some of the bitterness.
Another option is to use the lettuce with a soft or sweet green to help to ease the flavor and still be edible.
Works Well: Soaking the lettuce in cold water for about ten minutes and drying and putting it in the fridge is also useful at improving the taste.
Conclusion
Bitter lettuce can leave a very bitter taste in your mouth, which can be disappointing after growing it yourself.
That said, there are certainly ways to prevent your Aerogarden lettuce from becoming bitter, so hopefully this list has helped you figure out the best way to decrease lettuce bitterness.
And, as a last resort, just harvest your crop and plant some new lettuce seeds.
They should grow nice and quickly in the Aerogarden!