Martha Stewart's Suggestion For A Great Vegetable To Grow As A Beginner

If you're just starting as a gardener, it can be tempting to jump right in on fruit-bearing plants like peppers and tomatoes. However, while there's nothing wrong with earning your green thumb on these plants, Martha Stewart offers a different suggestion based on her years of gardening experience (via YouTube).

According to Stewart, lettuce is one of the easiest, most versatile plants to grow. Lettuce loves full-sun conditions, but it also grows well in partial shade with minimal differences. Additionally, some varieties can mature in as little as one month! But Stewart's favorite thing about lettuce is that you can harvest the whole head or just pick off a few leaves as needed, leaving the plant to develop more.

This works great with her flavorful secret for the best make-ahead salads: mason jars. By only picking off what you need and storing them in jars, your local climate's growing season is a cornucopia of guaranteed, on-demand salads. Whether you're looking for a lettuce type for salads, sandwiches, and beyond, you can always find something that works for your area. However, if you want to maximize your harvest, a few simple tricks can guarantee your plants thrive through scorching heat or when under siege from any number of garden pests.

Despite lettuce being so easy to grow, it still suffers from outside threats like aphids and hot temperatures. Fortunately, both of these are fairly easy to tackle and won't harm your crop provided you monitor it appropriately.

Aphids are tiny, life-sucking bugs that love to cling to plants in hot, dry weather. While picking them off by hand or killing them with spinosad soap are the most reliable ways to get rid of them once they're present, coffee grounds keep pests out of your garden quite well. Mixing coffee grounds with the soil around your plant helps it absorb some of the caffeine, a natural poison to most small insects, which deters aphids from invading your lettuce crop. You can also blend coffee grounds with water to make an eco-friendly spray that works almost as well as spinosad soap or specialized insecticides.

If you live in a climate that regularly gets above 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, you may notice your lettuce starting to bolt – meaning it gets long and leggy rather than dense as it sends up a stalk, quite literally going to seed. While this can make your crop bitter, Martha Stewart has some experience with this and offers plenty of workarounds. First, there are plenty of heat-resistant varieties Stewart loves, like Monte Carlo Romaine, which she says are great for sandwiches (per Martha Stewart). Second, you could always plant some of her favorite fast-growing varieties, like buttercrunch, in the spring to get a good crop before the weather gets too hot.