Summer 38 Celtuce
Meet a new vegetable! Stem lettuce, also called celtuce, is a Chinese specialty. Coming from the same species as regular old lettuce, these plants are grown for their large edible stems rather than their leaves. Stem lettuces are the aster family’s answer to kohlrabi.
I first tasted stem lettuces in Yunnan Province in 2019, and fell in love. They have a great flavor. Mild and enjoyable: a little lettucy, a little asparagusy. This variety comes from Kitazawa Seed Company, and lives up to its claim to fame: producing an excellent crop in the summer! With other varieties, the seed packets will warn that they should only be grown in the fall. We had a huge harvest around July 10th though: about 200 stalks from our trial plot. They went into the CSA and to the farmers market. The following week, everybody came back for more! They’re a sensation!
Here in Paonia, we see this plant as one of the hopes for the future of vegetable farming in our region. We’ve had several years of near-plague levels of grasshoppers, and the bugs didn’t touch these stem lettuces at all. Any crop that can resist the grasshoppers deserves a place in our hearts, in our seed jars, and in our kitchen. In a world facing uncertain agricultural futures, stem lettuces seem perfectly adapted to our region, growing fast enough to outpace weeds, surviving the bugs, and still being delicious and tender when bolting a little bit from the early summer heat. Plus, the stems last weeks and weeks in the refrigerator, similar to their brassica rivals the kohlrabi. The bitter greens are edible for some bitter food lovers, or they make great chicken feed. Some of our farmers’ market customers like to cook the greens too as a bitter stir fry (if you’ve never tried cooked lettuce, it’s delicious!).
When cooking, we pull the bitter leaves off, peel the stems, chop the stems up, and blanch in salt water for 10 seconds. The salt helps pull the hint of bitter out.
We’ve saved about 65 plants for seed production, and seeds should be available through our friends at Vibrant Earth Seeds for the spring growing season of 2025!