Top tip Tuesday - lettuce plants

I hope you had a good weekend. We had a great weekend - I had one working freelance-always good for the finances. On Sunday , we had the Watercress festival in Alresford. This festival celebrates the watercress that is grown in the town since the 1870s. Sometime later it was transported to London by steam train and Alresford now has the Watercress steam trains. The train line runs from Alresford through to Alton and you are able to connect to the British rail line which oes to London Waterloo ! So we have a good watercress heritage !
We had a lovely time mooching around the stalls. It was very busy and thank goodness the rain held off! There were lots of stall selling local produce - meat, pickles, chocolates,asparagus , tomatoes from the Isle of Wight, lavender, plants for the garden. And as it was a festival celebrating a food item there were lots of lovely stalls selling burgers and sausages and other ready to eat consumables.
There was plenty to entertain everyone with craft stalls, cookery demonstrations , watercress eating completion which my daughters boyfriend had entered. ( sadly didn't win but a great effort considering he doesn't like the stuff normally ! Sorry I don't any photos but my phone died just as we arrived and I hadn't wanted to lug my normal camera round - so many apologies!
So top tip today is to do with lettuces. If you are like me and have had your recent sowings of lettuces munched by slugs and you want to get ahead with lettuces whilst you are waiting for your new slug controlled lettuces to grow. Then do as I did - purchase a container of living lettuce from the vegetable section of the supermarket. I accustomed mine to the out doors for a few days in the container. Then divide up into little clumps. I have in the past divided them up almost singly and planted these. They take a week or so to recover but will grow on to be individual lettuces.
This year I have divided them up into little clumps and planted them into containers. I hopefully will be able to select odd leaves from each of the plants later for salads. You get a bargain number of plants for as little as a pound!you need to make sure you purchase the living salad that has lots of different leaves, not the one that looks like it only has four plants in it! I'm off to water the ones I planted yesterday........