How to Collect and Save Lettuce Seed

Don’t toss that lettuce that bolted. Collect the seeds and give yourself and endless supply of fresh lettuce!

Lettuce will bolt and flower when the season gets warm or the plant is in the ground too long. The plant gets leggy and the leaves turn bitter marking the end of that lettuce’s run.

You could just pull those plants and make room for something else. But, if you have room in the garden and like the lettuce, you can actually collect the seeds and have a more or less endless supply of fresh lettuce. By collecting a little seed after the first and last runs of the season, I have enough fresh lettuce seed to go all year round.

Collecting and saving lettuce seed is really easy. All you need is some scissors, a paper bag, and a container to store the seeds. Here’s how to do it.

Choosing a Lettuce Variety to Save Seeds

This technique works with any type of lettuce, but heirloom or open pollinated varieties will give you the most reliable results. Hybrids and cultivars don’t breed true from seed, so you may end up with something that’s a lot different than the plant from which you collected the seed.

Ice Queen lettuce is an heirloom lettuce and my go-to for collecting seed

My go-to lettuce is Ice Queen, which is a French crisphead (aka “iceberg”) heirloom. It has ruffly out leavers you can use loose leaf style, and a crispy ball head you can eat like an Iceberg lettuce.

Ice Queen also deals with both heat and cold quite well, so here in USDA Zone 9, we can grow it year-round, ensuring that we always have some fresh lettuce available.

Step 1 – Let Your Lettuce Flower

Ice Queen head lettuce bolts and looks like Christmas trees

Once the plant starts to bolt, it will get tall and leggy. Flower shoots will appear between the leaf joints and flower buds will appear at the end of the plant.

Let them go through their flowering. Lettuce flowers actually attract beneficial insects like hoverflies which will pollinate the flowers while their larvae will feed on crop pests like aphids and thrips. So, you’re not just getting seeds, you’re helping your garden as well.

This lettuce has flowered and is covered in down

Lettuce flower down

Once the flowers finish, the petals will begin to drop leaving white down. The seeds are attached to the end of the down. When the wind blows, the down carries the seeds away, so you want to collect your seed when the plant is at its downiest.

Step 2 – Clip the Lettuce Flower Stalks and Collect the Seed

Lettuce flower stalks clipped for bagging

You’ll know the seed is ready to collect when the flowers have peaked and are in their down phase. If you’re in doubt as to whether they’re ready, just keep an eye out for goldfinches and similar small seed-eating birds. When they start raiding the plants, you know they’re ready.

These seeds are ready to collect

To collect the seed, you need a paper bag (a lunch sack is perfect) and a pair of scissors.

Find the stalks with the most down on them and cut them from the plant near the base where they come off the main plant. When you have enough of the stalks, squeeze them together about midway up them stems, close enough to the flower heads that they’re pressed together, but not so close that you’re knocking seed off.

Then insert the stalks headfirst into the paper bag. Tie off the bag opening with some twine, a twist-tie, etc., and hang the bag somewhere dry and out of direct sunlight.

The lettuce stalks inserted in the bag and ready to hang dry

Step 3 – Separate the seed from the stalks

In 2-3 weeks, the stalks should be dry and brown and the flowerheads will easily separate from the seed.

The simplest way to separate the seed is to simply squish the bag with the plants in it. Give the bag a good squeeze and roll it around a bit, allowing the seed to fall to the bottom of the bag. Then remove the spent stalks from the bag.

Squish the contents of the bag to separate the seeds from the stems

Lay out a piece of paper (plain white is best because it makes it easy to see the seeds) and pout the contents of the bag onto the paper.

Get rid of any remaining leaf litter, flower parts, small sticks, etc., so that only seed remains on the paper.

Step 4 – Package Your Seed

Ice Queen seeds packaged and ready for use

All that remains now is to place your collected seed in an airtight / lightproof container. I prefer coin envelopes because they’re cheap and easily available, but mint tins, old medicine bottles, and similar things work well too.

You should just be able to fold your paper with the seeds on it and pour them into your container. If you have trouble, a small funnel is helpful.

Once you have your seed in the container, seal it and make sure to label it with the seed type and date (guessing games with seeds is never fun). Lettuce seed typically stays fresh for 1-3 years, so having that date on there will let you know when it’s best “use by” date is.

Once your seed is packaged, you’re set. Just keep it dry and away from light, and it should stay fresh until you’re ready to plant again!

Oh, and you’ll be surprised how much lettuce seed you can collect from a single plant — probably 5x-10x as much as you get in a typical commercial seed packet. Definitely enough to give to all your friends, and still have enough to plant several beds worth of lettuce. Plus, now that you know how to collect it, you can always raise more!