‘Pint Size’ Mini-Head Iceberg Lettuce Variety
This is 'Pint Size' iceberg lettuce. This variety is a mini or mini head size.
Here in Maine, this is coming out of the tail end of an early spring planting, so it's kind of achieving the largest size that it can. You can see it's hitting about 8" here. In most of the country, it's going to come in closer to a 5" head. So that is kind of the upper end of the mini lettuce types.
And you can see in this plot here, the frame of this lettuce is very small. So there's just a few wrapper leaves on each of these heads before we get to the actual head itself. That's unusual in icebergs. Usually, the plant is spending a lot of time growing those outer wrapper leaves and then eventually makes the head.
What that means is that this has an edge on larger icebergs in terms of earliness. It's going to come in a few days to a week earlier than our 'Crispino' and most other larger iceberg heads.
This small frame size also means that this variety will tolerate a tighter spacing than typical icebergs. Here we have it at 12" and you kind of see the max plant size potential here. This variety will tolerate an 8" spacing very well and make reliable, beautiful small heads. We haven't brought it down to a 6" spacing, but it's possible that in some locations you could even squeeze it in that tight and you would get nice heads, so really flexible in terms of planting schemes here.
'Pint Size' is suitable for multi-season planting. This variety has been extensively trialed in California and is able to be grown across the seasons there as well as here in the Northeast. So a lot of adaptability and flexibility here. Very reliable in making a solid head on every plant, which is not always what we see in icebergs.
I'm going to cut a head open and we can see what it looks like on the inside. This is pretty typical of what you see, small core – sometimes you get icebergs that just genetically have a large core and so there's a lot of weight, but that weight is actually taken up with just a big lettuce core in the middle, not the case here, really nice small core. As you can see this right now, it's kind of right at its prime moment and really nicely tightly packed heads, that classic iceberg texture, crunch, juicy, very sweet, delicious eating quality and beautiful packed heads. If we peel them back, this is what we're getting. Again, this is kind of the larger end of the potential on this variety. In the fall in the Northeast or in lower latitudes than here in Maine, you're going to get a slightly smaller head than this, more of a true mini.
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